New Investment: Text IQ

Great power, great responsibility: as the data revolution continues, and companies big and small are increasingly able to collect and analyze massive amounts of data, they are facing rapidly mounting pressure to become much better data stewards. Security, privacy and compliance were largely an afterthought, but there are becoming crucial topics. Regulation is rapidly spreading around the world – witness for example GDPR, CCPA and the even more ambitious New York privacy bill.

As abundantly evidenced in the news, corporations are woefully unprepared to handle the challenge of identifying, managing and securing sensitive data in its various forms — PII, PHI, attorney privileged information, etc. The problem keeps getting worse as the amount of unstructured data keeps increasing in the enterprise. Too often, corporations tend to deal with it after the fact, once a crisis has occurred, in the context of litigation. Only a very small minority is able to address those issues proactively.

Interestingly, machine learning is particularly apt at sifting through large amounts of data and identifying the “needle in the haystack”. This opens great opportunities to startups in the space.

Today, I’m excited to announce that FirstMark is leading a $12.6M Series A in Text IQ, a company that uses novel AI technology to protect companies from high-stakes legal and compliance disasters. Co-founded by CEO Apoorv Agarwal (a PhD in artificial intelligence and NLP, with experience at IBM Watson) and COO Omar Haroun (a startup entrepreneur with a legal background), Text IQ is an impressive startup that has grown tremendously over the last year in particular and, notably, has done so profitably. The company also boasts a 100% conversion rate from pilot to signed contract, a testament to the quality of their product. Text IQ started with e-discovery as a first beachhead, and is now expanding into other areas of compliance and privacy.

Apoorv spoke a few weeks ago at Data Driven NYC and his talk is well worth watching in its entirety.

Of course, Text IQ is actively hiring across multiple offices in New York, San Francisco, Vancouver, B.C., and Cork, Ireland. Here’s the list of currently open opportunities: https://www.textiq.com/careers/

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