British startup Quantexa has made a name for itself over the years with its enterprise platform that employs AI and data analytics to fight money laundering and fraud.
Today, the company said it has raised a fresh $175 million to double down on that business and move deeper into another hot area: helping organizations understand and better use data across various silos to build and run AI services.
The funding, a Series F, values Quantexa at $2.6 billion post-money — a significant jump from its last valuation of $1.8 billion in 2023. Teachers’ Venture Growth (TVG), a division of the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan in Canada, led the deal, which also saw participation from previous backer British Patient Capital. The startup has raised just under $550 million to date, per PitchBook.
The funding is coming at a flush moment for the nine-year-old startup. The company says it has “thousands of users” on its platform, and its list of enterprise customers includes Prudential, Vodafone the U.K. government, HSBC, ABN-AMRO and Accenture. Its license revenue increased 40% in the last year, and it now has 16 offices across the world with some 800 employees.
This is also a key moment in the enterprise space. Organizations across both the private and public sectors are pushing to adopt more AI services, hoping it will help them cut costs, speed up how people work, and take on new kinds of work.
There is a small hitch, however. In many cases, those very organizations are sitting on huge troves of legacy, unstructured data that needs to be identified and sorted to train and run those new services.
Quantexa’s tools were built to tap troves of unstructured data in aid of anti-money laundering efforts, but its tooling turned out to be equally useful for curating data for AI applications. The startup has been building the latter business for a few years, and now with the huge demand for AI, it has become a growing focus for the company.
“To make AI technology work, you must get the data right. You must be able to trust the data. You must be able to curate the data. And that’s what we do,” the company’s founder and CEO Vishal Marria said in an interview.
Quantexa continues to see a lot of business in anti-money laundering and fraud identification, and it wants to continue growing in that space while working to expand its presence in a wider variety of AI projects.
In line with those goals, Quantexa said it would “fast-track” a partnership it inked with Microsoft in November: The startup is building an AI-powered workload for the Microsoft Fabric data analytics platform, and it will build an anti-money laundering solution for U.S. mid-market banks that will be distributed through the Azure Marketplace.
For enterprises that use Databricks, Marria said the startup plans to do more work in that environment, too, building on a partnership between the companies to use Quantexa’s technology to organise billions of data records to build and power generative AI apps.
The startup also wants to expand its reach in the public sector, specifically with an enlarged dedicated business unit that will help government bodies use “structured and unstructured data” to build AI services.
Marria would not comment on what work Quantexa is doing around the government’s big AI push (dubbed “Plan for Change”), but he pointed out that the company was involved in several projects beyond those that have been made public (such as this anti-fraud project it undertook with the Cabinet Office).
It’s that traction, plus Marria’s convincing push for growth at a time when so much is in flux, that have driven this particular round.
“Vish himself is quite extraordinary,” said Avid Larizadeh Duggan, the senior MD who runs TVG in EMEA. “He is a founder who comes with a vision, but is also a talent magnet, surrounded by exceptional people. Selling into regulated industries is not easy. You can tell he’s incredibly personable but also knows what he’s talking about. At the back of it, he has a clear understanding of the customer and product. All of these attributes are incredibly important when you invest, but for me, I feel that it’s even more important when the sands are shifting so quickly.”
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