Text IQ scores $12.6 million to use AI to detect sensitive information and protect companies from high-stakes legal, privacy and compliance disasters

Text IQ, an artificial intelligence startup that provides AI solutions for identifying sensitive information, today announced it has raised a $12.6 million Series A accelerate its expansion into enterprise compliance and privacy. The round was led by FirstMark Capital with Sierra Ventures. The funding will help the company accelerate its expansion into enterprise compliance and privacy. The funding will also support expansion of sales, marketing, and R&D Efforts, as well as entry into new markets and geographies.

Founded in 2014 by Dr. Apoorv Agarwal and Omar Haroun,  the New York City-based Text IQ develops advanced AI solutions for detecting sensitive information, helping large corporations mitigate their most dangerous legal, compliance, and privacy risks. A CB Insights AI 100 company, Text IQ customers include government agencies and Fortune 500 companies spanning pharmaceutical, financial services, insurance, technology, healthcare and other highly regulated industries.Text IQ is in a co-selling partnership with Microsoft and has attracted similar interest from other publicly traded technology companies.

Text IQ also features an Advisory Board that includes former Apple and Oracle General Counsel Dan Cooperman; former Verizon General Counsel Randal Milch; former Baxter International, Inc. Global General Counsel Marla Persky; and former Nationwide Insurance Chief Legal and Governance Officer Patricia Hatler.

The Text IQ suite of AI solutions leverages the latest in unsupervised learning, graphical modeling, and deep learning to uncover sensitive information hidden in enterprise data. The solutions help Chief Privacy Officers, Chief Information Officers, Chief Compliance Officers, General Counsel, and other executive roles at Fortune 500 companies reduce enterprise-wide risk and manage corporate reputation. Text IQ has recorded eight straight quarters of revenue growth and profitability, while growing its team 5x in the past eight months – with expectations of doubling head count by the end of 2019.

“We are in the right place at the right time to address a critical market need,” said Apoorv Agarwal, CEO and Co-founder of Text IQ. “Over the last several years we have carefully crafted an advanced AI solution for finding ‘sensitive needles in a haystack,’ earning the trust of legal departments across the Fortune 500. Based on this success, clients are actively asking us to apply our technology to a broader range of problems. We have responded with new solutions for compliance and privacy that are already gaining traction with large enterprise customers as they grapple with monumental challenges such as GDPR and CCPA.”

Added Matt Turck, Partner at FirstMark Capital, “We are impressed with Text IQ’s ability to deliver superior results to customers – a potent combination of 50%-or-more risk reduction and annual multi-million-dollar savings. In addition, Text IQ’s customer conversion rate is nothing short of phenomenal – every prospect that has completed a proof of concept with the company has become a customer. Our goal with this investment is to help Text IQ grow exponentially faster.”

Text IQ has developed a suite of AI solutions to help enterprises find sensitive information in near real time, greatly improving upon traditional manual processes. Text IQ’s AI solutions identify sensitive information at 10 times the speed and 4 times less cost than traditional methods – along with reducing the risk of missing sensitive information by over 50%.

Added Tim Guleri, Sierra Ventures, “Unstructured data is exploding, and enterprises need privacy management to stay competitive yet safe. This multi-billion-dollar market is shifting from manual approaches to using Artificial Intelligence, and we were looking for companies with superior technology solving this very specific enterprise need. Text IQ’s founders, Apoorv and Omar, have done a great job researching their markets, developing high-accuracy AI solutions, and delivering measurable benefits to their customers.”