After raising €5m in its Series A, Dublin-based AI start-up Aylien plans to hire for roles across UX design and data science, among others.
Aylien, a Dublin-based start-up providing AI-powered risk intelligence and financial analytics solutions, has announced that it raised €5m in its Series A round, and now plans to expand its team to around 50 people throughout 2020.
The round was led by Finch Capital, joining existing investors Atlantic Bridge University Fund, SOSV and Enterprise Ireland. This builds on the company’s growth in 2019, which included securing partnerships with Microsoft, Aon and Revolut.
In 2017, Aylien received €2m in funding, led by Atlantic Bridge University Fund, and announced plans to expand its team.
Now, the company says that new roles will mainly be technical hires across the areas of product, UI and UX design, engineering, data science and sales.
Aylien founder and CEO Parsa Ghaffari said: “This new round of funding will enable us to further develop our platform, as well as to expand into the US and 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.”
Aylien’s AI tech
Ghaffari, a native of Iran, selected Dublin as the location for his start-up back in 2012. Through natural language processing and machine translation technology, Aylien’s AI product “ingests, structures and understands” world news in 14 languages from more than 160 countries, according to the company.
This means end users can identify and assess the impacts of world events on their business in real time – often giving them a head start before stories break in mainstream or local media.
It can also be used to screen for adverse media, monitoring for negative press mentions of individuals and organisations for regulatory purposes.
Aylien has cited recent updates to its product around global event detection as the catalyst for its expansion into the risk intelligence space – something its team notes as a market relying more and more on public data sources for informed risk notifications and signals.
Ghaffari said: “We’re seeing a big shift towards utilising alternative sources of data such as news in risk management and finance applications which have, for the most part, remained untapped given the complexities of this kind of data.
“The Aylien platform turns the world’s news data into a rich, reliable and real-time source of information for businesses, that not only helps our customers reduce costs by significantly lowering the amount of human effort required in data collection and event discovery processes, but also generates additional revenues by capturing new information that would have previously been out of their reach.”
For updates on hiring, keep an eye on Aylien’s careers page here.
Disclosure: SOSV is an investor in Silicon Republic
Updated 20 December 2019, 13.30pm: A previous version of this article stated that Aylien will take on 50 new staff in 2020. This was amended to clarify that the company plans to grow its team to a total of 50 people next year.
