The following are some of the investment highlights in this space:
- Goldman Sachs has been particularly active in the last 2 years, participating in 6 separate deals to 4 companies: Context Relevant, Digital Reasoning Systems, Kensho Technologies, and Dataminr.
- Baidu took a minority stake in ZestFinance this month. ZestFinance said in a press release that the two companies will “work together to apply ZestFinance’s underwriting technology to Baidu’s search, location, and payment data in order to improve credit scoring decisions in China.”
- In the personal assistants/bots category, 4 companies — Trim, Penny, Kasisto, Cleo, and Insurify — raised funds in 2016 from investors including Social Capital, Eniac Ventures, Core Innovation Capital, and AlphaPrime Ventures.
- In credit scoring, companies that raised funds so far this year (as of 7/22/2016) include China-based WeCash, India-based CreditVidya, United Kingdom-based Aire and TypeScore, as well as California-based ZestFinance and Applied Data Finance.
- Some of the largest funding rounds include a $130M Series D round raised by Dataminr (analyzes twitter data to deliver real-time market information), and a $103M Series C round raised by Sentient Technologies (which is applying its algorithms to quantitative trading).
- Nearly half of the companies on the list are still in their early-stages and have not raised beyond a seed/angel or Series A round.
