Despite the coronavirus pandemic, fintechs have shown growth globally. As per a report, on average, fintech firms reported a year-on-year increase in their transaction numbers and volumes of 13 per cent and 11 per cent respectively in Q1-Q2 of 2020, as compared with the same period in 2019. In this regard, a Paris-based provider of analytics and AI solutions for investment professionals and enterprises, SESAMm, has announced its Series B round of funding of €7.5M.
About the investors
The round was led by two investors – NewAlpha Asset Management and The Carlyle Group. NewAlpha Asset Management offers products and services in the areas of Private Equity and Absolute Return strategies. In 2015 NewAlpha launched a Private Equity investment activity specialising in technology-driven sectors including Venture Capital (primarily fintech, insurtech and AMtech), and Growth Equity (TMT, health and industrial niches). It is a subsidiary of La Francaise AM (Crédit Mutuel Nord Europe group).
The Carlyle Group is a global investment firm that deploys private capital across three business segments – Global Private Equity, Global Credit and Investment Solutions. It has about $230B of assets under management. The firm employs more than 1,800 people.
Carlyle was one of SESAMm’s major clients that moved from pilot to scale and has had access to the company’s data solutions since the start of 2020.
In addition, SESAMm’s existing investors including partHavenrock, AngelSquare, La Caisse d’Epargne, BPI, and Banque Populaire, also participated in this round.
What services does SESAMm provide?
SESAMm is a fintech company that specialises in big data and artificial intelligence for investment. Its team builds analytics and investment signals by analysing billions of web articles and messages using natural language processing and machine learning. The company was founded in 2014 by Florian Aubry, Pierre Rinaldi, and Sylvain Forte.
With SESAMm’s Natural Language Processing (NLP) platform TextReveal and its quantitative data science platform SignalReveal, the company addresses the entire value chain of alpha research.
It’s more than 50 person team in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Tunis, and Metz (France) works with major hedge funds, banks and asset management clients globally for both fundamental and quantitative use cases.
Use of the funds
The raised capital will help SESAMm to increase headcounts and to expand its operations in Europe, Asia, and North America. The funds will also be used to develop its AI-enabled research tools and dashboards for corporate customers, as well as continuing R&D investment in its Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing tools.
The company also expects to expand in markets that include private-equity deal sourcing and portfolio management, according to the press release.
SESAMm’s growth
The company recently hired Dale Richards (previously President of Enterprise Data Management at Sungard and board member of Quandl) and Jonathan Neitzell (former Chief Data Officer at Goldman Sachs AM) as new board advisors, joining Mark Garbin (Independent Director, US Funds) in supporting SESAMm’s strategic decision-making and market expansion in North America.
Speaking about the future of his company, SESAMm’s CEO and co-founder Sylvain Forté says, “We understand our customers’ needs and challenges in using Big Data and AI effectively in the investment process. We launched our products TextReveal and SignalReveal to provide clients with relevant and actionable data and models, and plan to continue to improve these products in terms of speed, features, and addressable use cases as we did with our ESG monitoring analytics.”
In April 2019, the company had raised €4.4M in funding to expand into the US market – with its new offices – and in Japan. Prior to that, it had raised €2.6M in April 2018.
