Sesamm, a French start-up, uses natural language processing (NLP) to generate insights from digital content to help financial institutions and corporations achieve their ESG goals and expand internationally. raised €35 million ($37 million) in a funding round of
Despite growing backlash against ESG initiatives from some politicians and influential executives, companies are suffering from the reputational and commercial consequences of neglecting their environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) responsibilities. Still aware of the risks. -Parties with whom they transact business.
With that in mind, Sesamm enables businesses to track text data from across the web (news portals, NGO reports, social networks, etc.) and turn it into actionable insights.
supply chain
Sesam founders Pierre Rinaldi, Sylvain Forte and Florian Aubry image credit:Gum
Founded in Paris in 2014, Sesamm is part of the financial sector, particularly in the financial sector, including US investment giant Carlyle Group, French corporate and investment bank Natixis, Japanese multinational insurance holding company Tokio Marine and UK-based assets. Collecting a pretty impressive customer roster from all over. Management company Unigestion.
Enterprises can access Sesamm’s flagship product, TextReveal, through several pipelines, including an API that brings Sesamm’s NLP engine into their systems. In addition, Sesamm also offers a web-based dashboard that gives companies access to data analysis, visualization and push notifications for various due diligence, compliance and ESG scenarios.
For example, companies that want to monitor their supply chain partners can use Sesamm to track emerging fraud lawsuits and other litigation, or anything related to their partners that falls into the public domain. This allows you to proactively respond to alerts the moment you receive them through Sesamm. Launched by Sesamm a few months ago, these ESG his alerts can be delivered via email or system integrations such as customer relationship management (CRM) applications.
Elsewhere, private equity firms can use Sesamm for due diligence on potential acquisitions or investments. In fact, Sesamm boasts a “20 billion article data lake” and applies NLP algorithms to identify mentions of companies of all kinds, slicing, dicing, and classifying the data into user-friendly dashboards. To do.
“Private equity firms typically work with consulting firms to conduct due diligence on target companies,” Sesamm co-founder and CEO Sylvain Forté told TechCrunch. “The cost of doing this is very high, and the amount of data on the web is huge for an individual to go through, so the results are sub-optimal. It often happens.”
However, the Sesamm platform can be configured for a variety of use cases, such as analysis of “share of voice” competitors, or other themes that may be relevant to your enterprise.
“A lot of our use cases are focused on ESG because of the current focus on ESG in the industry, but it does provide insight on some types of information,” said Forté. . “This includes brand sentiment, thematic stock baskets and indices, corporate leadership reputations, web insights on macroeconomic indicators such as inflation, and more.”
An example of an ESG dashboard created with Sesamm image credit:Gum
According to Forté, Sesamme, like the current generative AI poster child ChatGPT, pre-trains a large language model and fine-tunes the algorithm on its own dataset based on all the data. Over 100 languages supported.
“Sesamm integrates a wide variety of data. Over 20 billion articles in 100 languages with a history of 14 years,” said Forté. “Data sources include vetted news outlets, expert blogs and social media. Sesamm also manages licensing of proprietary data sources from premium news channels.”
Practicing Sesam NLP image credit:Gum
Sesamm’s competitors include a number of well-funded rivals, including New York-based AlphaSense, which reached a $1.7 billion valuation last year, and Dataminr, which was most recently a $4.1 billion company. And Factset, a $15 billion financial data company, entered his AI-powered ESG data space three years ago when he acquired Truvalue Labs.
But the fact that Sesamm raised a large sum at a time when investors’ cash seemed to be drying up against the backdrop of ChatGPT’s hype and the burgeoning company’s ESG commitments says something.
“The significant funding raised during difficult market conditions highlights the relevance of Sesamm’s focus on two key trends: AI and sustainability,” said Forté. In addition, these tools enable the organization to make better decisions and fill data gaps regarding both public and private companies, especially in his ESG. ”
Sesamm has raised around €15 million ($16 million) to date, and with its latest funding injection (referred to as the Series B2 round), the startup has brought in a number of new and existing investors. , some of which are also customers. Among them is Opera Tech Ventures, his VC arm of BNP Paribas. Carlyle Group; undigested; Elevator Ventures, a VC offshoot of Raiffeisen Bank International. AFG Partners, CEGEE Capital, New Alpha Asset Management.
Sesamm said it plans to use its new capital to further expand into the US and Asian markets.
