Accern secures $13M Series A funding for its AI-powered real-time surveillance platform that monitors over 300 million websites

Accern, a New York City-based artificial intelligence tech startup that uses AI and machine learning to help enterprises to make better financial service decisions, announced it has closed a $13 million Series A funding round to expand its customer base and further develop its no-code AI platform that drives organization-wide efficiency. The round, which brings the company’s total funding to $14.5 million, was led Fusion Fund, with participation from Mighty Capital, Allianz Life Ventures, Vectr Fintech Partners, Viaduct Ventures, and other existing investors.

Founded in 2014 by Forbes 30 Under 30 alumni Kumesh Aroomoogan, a founding member of the Forbes Finance Council, and Anshul Vikram Pandey, Ph.D., an award-winning data-science researcher, Accern is a real-time web surveillance platform that monitors 300 million websites, alerting investors on actionable stories about U.S. public companies. Its customers include hedge funds, asset managers, equity researchers and news media. Accern utilities proprietary natural language processing and machine learning algorithms to condense news articles, blogs and social media posts with feature-rich analytics that is customized as per a company’s requirement.

Accern’s AI Platform contains ready-made solutions for the financial service industry across asset management, banking and insurance. Powered by adaptive learning, Accern allows enterprises to build powerful workflow automation and risk management solutions for investment research, credit lending, financial crimes (KYC) and reputational risks, among others. Using AI and machine learning, Accern takes care of the time-consuming process of procuring, licensing, cleaning, normalizing, and integrating various unstructured text data sources for its customers, mostly financial services companies.

“You can think of Accern as the one-stop-shop for analytics solutions. We have, pretty much, the entire coverage of public financial news and we could customize whatever stuff they (clients) want,” says Kumesh Aroomoogan, Co-founder and CEO of Accern.

Not only does Accern deliver real-time updates, they also provide their customers with data quality by scanning the articles using artificial intelligence to determine if the articles are positive or negative and how many people may have read it.  Accern also partners with with multiple data vendors. The team buys most of its data from ‘data vendors’, thus in order to maintain low costs on scraping and crawling, they have identified sources to crawl faster than others.

“Organizations could lose customers, financial gains and their reputations when they are lagging behind on technology innovation. Accern enables enterprises to increase efficiency by deploying our AI solutions at scale within our no-code AI platform,” says Aroomoogan. “This round allows us to further democratize AI within enterprises and serve more customers across asset management, banking and now, insurance and fintech.”

Created for developers, data scientists and business analysts, Accern’s no-code platform allows users to build and deploy AI solutions in minutes. The seamless, data-driven platform brings together an integrated data store, AutoML taxonomy capabilities, adaptive NLP and forecasting models, and multiple integrations to import and export solutions.

“Every organization wants to use the immense volume of unstructured data that they have on hand for competitive advantage. Data scientists and R&D leaders are charged with helping their organizations make this happen, but they cannot waste time recreating the same basic code over-and-over again. Accern’s no-code user interface (UI) creates AI solutions with a few clicks, enabling data scientists to rapidly create models and turn them into actionable solutions for the enterprise,” says Pandey. “Our adaptive NLP and forecasting models are able to learn from past actions and provide intelligent recommendations going forward which is very useful for credit and insurance underwriting, portfolio risk, fraud detection, and more. Now teams are able to share their works, integrations, models, taxonomies and more across the enterprise to be leveraged in other use cases, significantly reducing the amount of re-work, and therefore time, that goes into every solution.”

In the two years since its $1M+ seed round, Accern has expanded its solutions to reach banking and insurance while growing its team within New York City. Accern’s technology can be tailored by industry. Its clients and strategic partners include Allianz, Jefferies, IBM, Google, and Microsoft. Currently, Accern’s technology is being considered in conversations on Capitol Hill as a potential solution to predict the spread and financial impact of the Novel Coronavirus, COVID-19.

“Fusion Fund is excited to join the Accern team. There is a great potential of applying the AI technology to improve the efficiency in the finance industry and discover the true value of the data. Accern has one of the best products and teams in the industry for this endeavor,” said Lu Zhang, of Fusion Fund, and a member of Accern’s Board. “We are excited to help accelerate the company for its next stage of partnership and market expansion.”

Along with Forbes 30 Under 30 in the 2018 Enterprise Technology category, Accern has been recognized as a top Text Parsing Tool by JP Morgan. The company has also been named among the top 10 AI Software by O’Reilly and Intel AI and top 10 Data Analysis Tools by Benzinga.

“The consistent growth Accern has driven since we initially met the startup is impressive,” said Emily Reitan with Allianz Life Ventures, a customer-turned-investor of the budding startup. “Their innovation and success speak for itself, and we are thrilled to be a part of the company’s growth moving forward.”