NewtonX, the world’s first AI-powered expert search engine, scores $12 million to connect companies with leading technology experts

NewtonX, an artificial intelligence startup that connects leading corporate, management consulting and investment professionals to the world’s leading technology experts, has closed $12M Series A funding round to support its growth plans and expansion of the organization’s personnel count from 30 to 100 within the next year. The round was led by Two Sigma Ventures, with participation from Third Prime Capital and Xfund.

Founded in 2016 by by CEO Germain Chastel, COO Sascha Eder and CTO Anuja Ketan, NewtonX’s expert, the New York-based NewtonX is the world’s first AI-powered Knowledge Marketplace. NewtonX’s expert knowledge search platform uses a proprietary suite of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic process automation (RPA) technology to dramatically reduce the time and cost of surfacing industry expertise and knowledge.

NewtonX enables clients—including Microsoft, 23andMe, and the majority of the top 10 management consulting firms—to leverage the power of automation to connect with professionals who have subject-matter expertise. The company has transformed knowledge access for numerous Fortune 100 companies by cutting out the middleman, providing streamlined connections to expertise for use cases such as: voice of the customer analysis, competitive intelligence, product benchmarking, and due diligence.

NewtonX will also use the fresh capital infusion to increase expert discovery capabilities through technology investments and data acquisition, as the company officially launches its external facing platform. Its platform focuses on real-time knowledge access through two core technologies: NewtonX Graph: a universal ontology mapping knowledge profiles against a graph architecture and NewtonX Matching Algorithm: a machine learning-based script maximizing the relevance of the experts proposed for each client search.

“When my cofounder, Sascha, and I first conceived of NewtonX, we were working on a highly confidential project that required insight into market expansion opportunities for self-driving cars. We needed several in-person workshops and a 50-expert survey within a one-week deadline, but found that there was no solution on the market to meet this deadline while maintaining the quality of the experts chosen,” says NewtonX CEO Germain Chastel. “Our company’s growth—from three entrepreneurs working out of a basement to over 30 employees out of Madison Avenue—only reiterates this demand. We are thrilled to continue to grow our expert discovery platform to help reimagine how business is done at some of the largest institutions in the world.”

Since the company’s founding in 2017, NewtonX has built two core pieces of technology—an expert search engine and an expert conversion engine—to transform the process of finding and onboarding high-quality experts. Now, two years later, NewtonX is opening this technology up to external use in the form of a client-facing platform with a complete product line.

“What struck us about NewtonX is that they’re attempting to create a paradigm shift in the B2B expertise market. Incumbent market research firms, consulting firms, and expert networks used to rely on pre-existing pools of expert consultants,” says Dan Abelon, Partner at Two Sigma Ventures. “We believe NewtonX is turning this model on its head by automating custom searches to recruit the best experts in real time for any given client request and, in doing so, is capable of transforming multiple industries.”

NewtonX has even leveraged its own technology to recruit a talented and diverse team. By using its search engine to proactively reach out to hundreds of people for any given role, NewtonX is able to consider a wide range of diverse candidates who may not otherwise have applied to work at NewtonX, or in tech in general. As a result, NewtonX is proud to have a team of over 50 percent women and, just as importantly, over 50 percent women operating in leadership roles.