Irish startup Aylien raises $5.54 million for its AI-powered risk intelligence and financial analytics platform

Millions of real-world events and breaking stories are captured by news outlets every day. These events and news stories contain wealth of information that serve as real-time source of business insight. Enter Aylien, an AI-powered news intelligence platform that combs through millions of daily events and digests the world’s news content while identifying and tracking what matters to business with human-level accuracy. Its solution is currently being used by tech giants including Microsoft and Moody’s.

Today, the Dublin, Ireland-based Aylien announced it has closed $5.54 million (€5 million) Series A funding round to accelerate growth and expansion into the risk intelligence market, as well as the development of a new revenue channel and product line via a user-facing application.

The round was led by Finch Capital, with participation from  existing investors, Atlantic Bridge University Fund, SOSV, and Enterprise Ireland. In conjunction with the funding, Aylien also announced that Finch Capital’s Partner Hans De Back has joined its board of directors. The latest funding announcement comes after significant growth in 2019 and business partnerships with leaders in the risk and finance space including Microsoft, Aon, and most recently Revolut, the fastest growing fintech company in Europe.

Founded in 2010 by Parsa Ghaffari, Aylien is an early stage artificial intelligence startup that focuses on creating technologies that help machines understand human languages better. The startup provides Text Analysis and News API’s that allow users to make sense of human-generated content at scale. Aylien also provides a range of content analysis solutions to developers, data scientists, marketers and academics. Their core offerings include packages of information retrieval, machine learning, natural language processing and image recognition APIs.

Aylien’s proprietary Artificial Intelligence ingests, structures, and understands the world’s news in 14 languages from over 160 countries using its proprietary Natural Language Processing and Machine Translation technology. This provides their end-users with advanced event discovery and investigation capabilities that allow them to identify and quantify the impact of events that matter to their business often before they break in mainstream media.

“Aylien’s news intelligence solution allows us to provide relevant, timely, and trusted news updates for our wealth and trading customers, that help them make informed decisions when trading in the Revolut app,” said Andre Mohamed, Head of Wealth & Trading at Revolut.

Commenting on the funding, Parsa Ghaffari, Founder & CEO, Aylien, said: “We turn the world’s news data into a rich, reliable, and real-time source of information for businesses. This new round of funding will enable us to further develop our platform, as well as to expand into the US & UK markets where most of our customers are based. We’re very excited to partner with Finch Capital, who are experts in the FinTech and InsureTech domains.”

“Finch Capital are delighted to lead the latest investment round in Aylien and to back such a technically talented team. Aylien have developed world leading Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing technology which we believe has exciting applications across risk management, finance, and intelligence,” Mike Brennan, Principal, Finch Capital said.

Dr. Helen McBreen, Investment Director and Aylien Board Director, Atlantic Bridge, said: “This investment enables Aylien to continue to expand into new global markets after a successful 2019. The company has achieved strong market growth and very impressive customer adoption, particularly in financial services and risk intelligence markets.”