How insights are supplied
Sesamm, a Paris-based startup, has built up an impressive clientele from the financial sector in particular, including the U.S. investment powerhouse Carlyle Group, French investment and corporate bank Natixis, Japanese multinational insurance holding company Tokio Marine, and U.K.-based asset management company Unigestion.
Using a variety of channels, including an API that integrates Sesamm's NLP engine into third-party systems, businesses may use TextReveal, the company's main offering. Sesamm also provides a web-based dashboard where businesses may access data analysis, visualizations, and push alerts for different due diligence, compliance, and ESG situations.
Sesamm may be used by a business that wishes to monitor its supply chain partners, for instance, to track any information that becomes public about such partners, such as newly emergent fraud cases or other disputes. This enables customers to immediately take preventive action after receiving an alert from Sesamm. These ESG notifications, which Sesamm debuted a few months ago, may be sent by email or system integrations, such as a customer relationship management (CRM) tool.
Sesamm may also be used by private equity companies to do due diligence on possible acquisition or investment opportunities. In fact, Sesamm touts a "20 billion article data lake" to which it uses its NLP algorithms to find mentions on any sort of organization. The data is then chopped, sliced, and organized into user-friendly dashboards.
CEO and co-founder of Sesamm Sylvain Forté told TechCrunch that private equity funds often work with consulting firms to undertake due diligence on their target businesses. The price of doing this is really high, and the outcome is less than ideal since there is a huge amount of material on the internet for one person to look through. As a consequence, the findings are usually inaccurate since they are not thorough enough.
The Sesamm platform, however, may be set up for a wide range of scenarios, including competition analysis based on "share of voice" or any other topic that would be relevant to a business.
Many of their use-cases are centered on ESG because of the current industry concentration on that topic, but Forté pointed out that they provide insights into a variety of information kinds as well. In addition to other things, this includes sentiment on brands, themed stock baskets and indexes, firm leadership repute, and online insights on macro-economic variables like inflation.
Forté claims that Sesamm pre-trains massive language models — like ChatGPT, the current poster child for generative AI — on all the data it collects and then fine-tunes the algorithms on its own data, which are annotated in more than 100 languages it supports.
Sesamm combines a wide range of data, including more than 20 billion articles in 100 languages with a 14-year history, according to Forté. Social media, reputable blogs, and highly rated news organizations are among the data sources. Moreover, Sesamm oversees the licensing of exclusive news networks' data sources.
A number of well-funded competitors, such as New York-based AlphaSense, which was valued at $1.7 billion last year, and Dataminr, which was most recently a $4.1 billion firm, compete with Sesamm. And three years ago, FactSet, a $15 billion financial data behemoth, purchased Truvalue Labs, breaking into the AI-powered ESG data market.
Yet, given the ChatGPT hype train and expanding corporate ESG obligations, the fact that Sesamm has secured a huge portion of money at a time when investors' capital seems to have dried up tells something of a tale.
Raising a sizable sum in the midst of difficult market circumstances demonstrates the relevance of Sesamm's emphasis on two major topics — AI and sustainability, Forté added. The result is that these technologies help businesses make better choices and close data gaps, notably in ESG, for both public and private firms.
Beforehand, Sesamm had received around €15 million ($16 million), and with its most recent financial infusion, which it is referring to as a Series B2 round, the business welcomes a plethora of new and old investors, some of whom are also clients. Notable companies include Carlyle Group, Unigestion, Raiffeisen Bank International's VC offshoot Elevator Ventures, AFG Partners, CEGEE Capital, and New Alpha Asset Management. BNP Paribas' VC arm Opera Tech Ventures, which co-led the round with VC company Elaia, was another example.
The U.S. and Asian markets will be further penetrated by Sesamm using its newfound money, the company said.
