US start-up Sensai has announced it raised $US900K in seed funding to develop its unstructured data analysis platform, which it is initially targeting at larger financial services and compliance organizations.

Sensai is already used in the Fortune 2000 in financial services and compliance, and has signed customers including engineering giant Siemens, Swiss financial services company UBS, and asset management firm WorldQuant.

According to the company, today’s data science teams often rely on structured data alone to make projections and validate strategic decisions. In many cases, these teams have been forced to choose between omitting unstructured data from their efforts, or engaging in months of manual work to organize and analyse these data types. Sensai aims to make it possible to analyse unstructured data such as news articles, call transcripts, legal and regulatory filings, and social media to uncover insights, identify trends and mitigate risks without the costly manual work.

“The world’s largest businesses have been forced to make decisions without the insights they need from unstructured data that has been available to them for years,” said Jonas Lamis, CEO and co-founder of Sensai.

“With the launch of Sensai, we’re putting the most advanced tools for analysis of unstructured data in the hands of data science teams. Our customers now have the ability to stay ahead of their market and make better decisions without investing in massive initiatives that rely upon slow, costly and custom-built processes.”

Companies can use Sensai to gain an edge in trading, ensure compliance through analysis of historic and current audit documentation, and to project company quarterly performance.

“Sensai empowers financial services companies with sophisticated ‘quantamental analysis capabilities’ without requiring deep in-house technical expertise,” said Greg Neufeld, a Partner at fintech accelerator ValueStream Labs.

“We’ve seen Sensai's technology in action at several of the most advanced hedge funds and investment banks in New York, and we're thrilled with their ability to deliver real value to Wall Street."

Sensai’s platform allows users to build investigations supported by hundreds of data sources, including proprietary data, lists, reports and over 500 million public documents. The system continuously tests and learns which algorithms and investigations produce the best results, then makes them available to other users on the platform. Rather than forcing analysts to build their own algorithms for every single investigation, Sensai makes it possible for users to use the most proven algorithms to gain better insights from their data sources in a fraction of the time.

Sensai then surfaces insights in real-time dashboards that can be consumed by decision-makers throughout the enterprise. Users can also generate customized endpoints through reports, exports, alerts, and APIs. In addition, Sensai can be deployed on premise or in the cloud as a service, and provides enterprise-grade group management for collaboration, along with advanced data protection.

It claims the Advanced and Predictive Analytics (APA) software market is projected to grow from $US2.2B in 2013 to $US3.8B in 2018.

To learn more, visit http://sens.ai/.