With $10 Million Investment, Ayfie Eyes Expansion Across Border and Industries
Analytics company ayfie has already established a foothold in e-discovery and has even branched out into mortgage documents. Now the business is looking to raise its profile in the global marketplace.
August 19, 2019 at 09:30 AM
3 minute read
Earlier this week, analytics company ayfie announced that it had raised $10 million in funding with an eye towards strengthening its business profile within the global marketplace, which includes building out its North American commercial team in Denver.
The investment period marks the second in ayfie’s history following an initial fundraising round in June 2017. Information surrounding the identity of the investors is being kept confidential, but the motivation behind the investment’s timing is rather transparent.
“We’ve been growing quite fast and we’re moving really, really fast in the legal tech and finance tech market. And to continue to that growth, we wanted to do another [investment] round,” said CEO Erik Baklid.
Ayfie got its start in late 2016. Per Baklid, the company already has a strong presence in the U.S. and Nordics, and just recently closed its first two deals in the U.K. Baklid would not say who those clients were but did mention that ayfie was interested in expanding further within that country.
The company’s software suite—including ayfie Inspector and ayfie Locator—has largely been built around the proliferation of Big Data. Its solutions rely on a foundation of linguistics-based information retrieval and text analytics to extract insights, personally identifiable information (PII) and other items of interest from robust sets of unstructured data.
Emerging privacy regimes such as the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation or the forthcoming California Consumer Privacy Act have helped facilitate a need for those services, especially in the realm of PII. But ayfie has also found ways to push its analytics tech into other niches.
For example, the company fully embraced e-discovery and contract review last fall with the launch of ayfie Accelerator, a blend of machine learning and linguistic-based text analysis that can locate and identify documents with similar concepts or traits. The platform also provides email threading and data visualization capabilities.
More recently, ayfie announced in March that its AI engine would be integrated with MIAC Analytics, a mortgage pricing and risk management solution provided by financial tech company Alpha Modus. The combination of the two allows users to perform indexing and data extraction within mortgage documents.
Baklid indicated that the ayfie was interested into expanding that technology into other use cases as well within the financial sector.
“We’ve been approached by several banks to develop with them. So we’re looking into that currently,” he said.
Still, however much ayfie expands its portfolio, there’s no shortage of competitors in the data analytics sphere. For example, last February a startup named Infinnium launched OpscurePI, software that can identify any document inside an organization that holds confidential personal identifying information. Barely a month later, DocuSign announced an investment of $15 million in Seal Software, which leverages AI to find hidden risks or other insights within contracts.
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