Accern, a company that uses artificial intelligence to analyze online conversations about specific companies, trends, and industries, announced that it had raised $20 million in a Series B funding led by Mighty Capital and Fusion Fund, with participation from Tribe Capital, Shasta Ventures, Gaingels, and others. The new funds will be used for "product-led growth," expansion into new markets, and R&D on Accern's AI technology, according to CEO Kumesh Aroomoogan.
In 2014, Kumesh Aroomoogan and Anshul Vikram Pandey co-founded Accern alongside Anshul Vikram Pandey, a veteran research analyst for Wall Street corporations, including Citigroup. Accern, based in New York, began by scanning the web for — and curating — a specific collection of financial data, primarily those relating to stocks. However, the firm's scope gradually expanded to include other parts of corporate finance, such as credit and fraud monitoring and compliance.
Customers may use Accern's AI-powered apps and natural language processing (NLP) models to recognize, classify, and extract financial terminology. For example, the service can scan public sources such as news publications, blogs, and SEC filings to evaluate consumer sentiment or predict how supply chain disruptions could affect a company.
Users can also construct custom AI-powered apps using Accern's visual dashboard, including pre-built taxonomies for corporations, individuals, places, and themes. Aroomoogan said, "We have currently an extensive collection of financial service use cases our customers are building on our platform, so they don't have to think about what can be built on our platform or spend time building one from scratch compared to traditional NLP cloud providers".
Of all, even the best-designed algorithms are subject to biases or drift, where their accuracy declines over time due to seasonality and erroneous data. Accern, like many other similar organizations with proprietary models, keeps its development processes under wraps. When asked whose datasets were used to train its models and how the company mitigates any potential biases, Aroomoogan didn't reveal.
Instead, Aroomoogan wants to highlight Accern's market traction while avoiding naming specific customers. While the company competes with Dataminr and, to a lesser extent, Noogata and Pecan.ai's data analytics products (as well as data providers like Reuters and Bloomberg), Aroomoogan boasts that Accern's yearly recurring income has increased 9x since 2020.
"Our solution fuels innovation for enterprises by providing them with powerful insights for decision-making. With this funding, we will scale sales and marketing to empower more citizen data scientists," said Kumesh Aroomoogan, the co-founder and CEO of Accern
To date, Accern has raised $35 million in funding. It currently employs 80 people and expects to have more than 100 by 2022.
