A couple of years ago, FirstMark led the Series A of Text IQ, an impressive AI startup focused on the management of unstructured data in the enterprise for legal, privacy and compliance purposes. The company was co-founded by Apoorv Agarwal (CEO, left) and Omar Haroun (COO, right), and had managed to grow both fast and profitably after raising a seed from our friends at Floodgate.
At its core, Text IQ leverages unsupervised learning to identify sensitive information (privileged documents, PII, PHI, etc.) in large amounts of unstructured data – a challenge that AI is uniquely equipped to solve.
After its Series A, Text IQ continued to make strong progress, building a great team, evolving the product into an enterprise-grade platform and securing an impressive list of Fortune 1000 customers.
Not surprisingly, this attracted the attention not just from potential Series B investors, but also acquirers.
Today, Text IQ is announcing its acquisition by Relativity, a leader in the discovery and compliance market, which just announced a large financing led by Silver Lake.
This acquisition is a very smart move by Relativity, which had been looking to accelerate its AI capabilities. AI is is both very disruptive and incredibly needed in the discovery market, which to date has largely been operating through painstaking manual review and keyword searching. With Text IQ, Relativity gets an AI platform that has been providing very impressive results to customers (see this customer testimonial from BASF for example), a great team and a fast-growing business.
The combination also makes a lot of sense for Text IQ, which will access Relativity’s distribution capabilities and its large customer footprint of more than 300,000 annual users in 49 countries managing more than 145 billion files.
We are excited for the Text IQ team and thank them for generating a meaningful return for their investors in a short period of time.
It’s been a real pleasure working with Apoorv and Omar and the whole Text IQ team (including the senior leaders, in no particular order: Jasneet Sabharwal, Chief Innovation Officer; Karan Kunjur, VP Revenue; Ian Holmes, VP Finance; Greg Kowalski, VP Engineering; Carl Landers, VP Marketing; Ashley Sullivan, VP Customer Solutions; Samee Lieber-Dembo, VP Customer Success) and the board (Tim Guleri from Sierra Ventures, Nick Washburn and Josiane Ishimwe from Intel Capital; Randy Milch; Owen Rambow, as well as my FirstMark colleague Lisa Xu).
Congratulations, Text IQ!
