AI-powered financial research platform Sentieo raises $19 mn in Series A round

Financial research platform Sentieo has raised $19 million (around Rs 140 crore at current exchange rates) in a Series A funding round led by Centana Growth Partners, a US-based private equity firm which provides growth capital to firms in the financial services space.

Sentieo, which works out of both India and the US, said in a blog post that its existing investors had also participated in the round.

The company will use the fresh capital for boosting global growth and product development, it added.

As part of the deal, Centana partner Eric Byunn will join the board of Sentieo.

Founded in 2015 by brothers and Harvard University alumni Alap Shah and Naman Shah, Sentieo is a financial data platform designed to empower financial teams of hedge funds, mutual funds, investment banks, corporates and active individual investors. 

It uses artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) algorithms to organise financial information that can help make investment teams more productive. It offers financial teams an advanced method to search for financial data, manage documents, and collaborate in a cloud-based platform.

“In our world we use AI and NLP to help researchers take away the monotonous work of extracting financial data from tables, finding key management commentary in a transcript or alerting a user to changes in a company’s risk factors disclosures,” read an official blog post.

Sentieo claims to be processing over 20 million financial documents from over 64,000 global companies to deliver information to more than 700 clients. It has a team of 130 with offices in San Francisco, New York, and New Delhi.

The company had raised $6 million in funding led by Clocktower Ventures and Long Focus Capital in March this year.

Several angel investors including former Thomson Financial chief executive David Flaschen, StockTwits founder Howard Lindzon, Adobe chief product officer Scott Belsky, and Moat president Aniq Rahman had participated in that round.

Alap Shah previously worked as an analyst with hedge funds Citadel and Viking Global Investors. He is also the co-founder of Thistle, a subscription-based cold-pressed juice and healthy food startup. 

Naman Shah previously co-founded Sarvajal, a social enterprise that provides filtered drinking water to India's under-served population.