Knowledge integration platform Onna announced on Wednesday that it had concluded a $27 million Series B investment round led by European venture capital firm Atomico. Other participants included Glynn Capital and previous investors Slack Fund, Dawn Capital and Nauta Capital.

Onna leverages a combination of machine learning and natural language processing to identify and index information stored across multiple collaboration or workflow applications, touching on use cases that range from e-discovery to compliance. The company plans to use the capital raised to continue broadening its integration capabilities, which in practice means putting money toward the growth of the company's product, engineering and partnership teams.

As for the timing of the Series B round, Onna chief strategy officer Kelly Griswold referenced the pivot that many organizations have made toward remote working in the face of COVID-19, which in turn has generated more reliance on the sort of collaboration platforms that have been a large part of the company's identity.

"These tools that are adopted to foster great collaboration and connectivity, they also present the challenge of siloing of information so that it's fragmented. And it's harder for companies, specifically legal and compliance departments for example, to control," Griswold said.

That mission statement has caught the attention of investors even before the pandemic. In January 2018, Onna concluded its first $5 million fundraising round lead by Nauta Capital with an eye toward building out additional platform integrations and further developing its artificial intelligence engine. Another $11 million funding round that closed in June 2019 saw investment from Dropbox and Slack Fund and was geared in the direction of helping the company expand its e-discovery and enterprise search capabilities.

With this latest round of fundraising, Onna is once again looking to develop new workflows, use cases and integrations. According to Griswold, Onna could potentially team with third parties to develop more connections into its platform and build new machine-learning models to assist with the identification and indexing of information.

From a commercial perspective, Griswold also broached the possibility of collaborating with tech companies in need of a system that enables them to process, index and enable search functions across their respective applications. "We really think that the platform is poised for our next wave of growth," she said.

Onna's capacity for growth may have lent a hand in attracting this most recent group of investors. Atomico principal Ben Blume referenced the steady adoption of cloud-based collaboration tools happening inside enterprises, which he in turn believes is creating new challenges to manage around privacy security and compliance.

"With applications for eDiscovery and Compliance among the first built on top of Onna's platform, data security and privacy had to be core competencies of Onna from day one, and Onna is well positioned to become a critical piece of any company's legal tech stack," Blume said.

Of course, search integration is not an exclusive field. Exterro's e-discovery software, for instance, can integrate with Microsoft's Exchange, Office 365 and Sharepoint. LexisNexis also released an expansion in 2019 that allows InterAction's CRM functions to operate inside Microsoft Office software.

This story has been updated with new comment from Atomico.