London-based Desia, a system of intelligence and AI productivity for investment professionals, announced on Tuesday that it has secured $3.3M (approximately €3M) in a pre-seed funding round led by Dig Ventures.
Other investors, including 2100 Ventures, Exor Ventures, and Octopus Ventures, also participated.
The funding round was joined by a group of angel investors, including Niccolo Maisto, Founder of FaceIT, Mark Ransford, Senior Advisor at CVC, and Massimo della Ragione, former Partner at Goldman Sachs.
The UK company will use the funds to accelerate its development and growth.
Investment professionals currently spend a lot of time manually sorting through unstructured data, which hampers productivity.
What does Desia solve?
This problem Desia intends to solve was experienced firsthand by co-founder and CEO Raffaele Terrone (co-founder of Italy’s first unicorn company Scalapay) during his time in investment banking at Goldman Sachs and Barclays, and in Private Equity at ICAMAP Investments.
Raffaele Terrone, co-founder and CEO at Desia, says, “I recall regularly sifting through data and information until the early hours during my time at Goldman Sachs to make fully informed decisions and strategies. With Desia the whole process would have been more efficient and successful. I wish it was available back then.”
At the same time, co-founder and CPO Alessandro Amaro and CTO Mehmet Öner Yalçin were leading the development of AI products for the investment team at Advent International that was facing similar issues.
The trio started working on Desia to help Raffaele streamline his angel investments more efficiently. After realising the commercial potential of their work, they began seeking external funding to support its growth.
Terrone continues, “This initial funding round is a major step towards developing the system for more structured and complex investment analyses.”
Provides advanced AI applications
Desia provides advanced AI applications for productivity, automation, and analytics for financial services. The platform was designed to eradicate data and productivity issues.
Alessandro Amaro, co-founder and CPO at Desia says, “We are privileged to have a team of brilliant people on board to help in our mission. We are tackling a tough problem that has challenged investment professionals for years. The complexity of unstructured data and inefficiencies in data processing are significant challenges, but the potential value we can deliver to our users is massive. With our experience in the investment industry and in building great products, we are well equipped to solve this problem and bring about meaningful change to the industry.”
Currently, the company employs 11 people, of which 4 are from Advent International.
The investor
Dig Ventures is a pre-seed and seed-stage fund investing in B2B SaaS and fintech companies in Europe and the US.
Ross Mason, Founding Partner at DIG Ventures, says, “Desia’s founding team, marked by their impeccable execution and deep market insight, is perfectly positioned to address an essential challenge within the financial industry. This reminds me vividly of the formative days at MuleSoft, where we similarly targeted a critical inefficiency in the market. Their innovative approach to automating data analysis leveraging AI promises substantial advancements in productivity for finance professionals.”
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