Understanding who you are doing business with has become critical in today’s business environment. Whether a prospect, customer, supplier, donor, prospective employee, or investor, businesses must understand not only the companies they may be partnering with but also the individuals. Enhanced focus on governance considerations also makes this a compliance issue. Xapien is an AI-powered intelligence engine that provides contextual background on any company or person worldwide. By leveraging national language processing, AI, and vast compute power, the platform allows businesses to cut through the noise by analyzing millions of disparate online sources (news, media, corporate records, etc) to generate an executive-level report in minutes, saving businesses countless hours of manual research and collation. While Google is a great starting point for a search, you still need to go through each result to determine relevance and the most important points; Xapien handles the “after search result” part expeditiously. Offered on a tiered subscription based on the number of reports generated per year, Xapien is trusted by a versatile roster of clients including Griffin Financial Technology, Dartmouth College, Zurich Insurance, and the Dubai International Finance Centre.
London TechWatch caught up with Xapien CEO Chris Green to learn more about the business, the company’s strategic plans, latest round of funding, and much, much more…
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
We just closed a £6M seed investment round, with a £4.5M injection from a round led by YFM Equity Partners and backed by D2 Fund.
Tell us about your product or service.
Described as ‘the ChatGPT of Due Diligence’, Xapien uses Artificial Intelligence to deliver an executive-level report on any person or organisation, anywhere in the world in minutes. Every piece of information is fully sourced, enabling confident, auditable decision-making.
What inspired the start of Xapien?
Every year, billions of dollars are wasted on laborious and time-consuming background research.
Firms seeking to do international business are facing a perfect storm. Emerging ESG considerations present complicated and nuanced risks. There is a continuing explosion in publicly available information, and ever-increasing regulation.
This creates an increasing need for organisations to really ‘know’ their third parties. This includes their customers, suppliers, donors, applicants and investors.
Put simply, firms can no longer afford to just ask ‘can we’ be in business with someone. They must also ask ‘should we’?
Traditional screening tools cannot answer this nuanced question. A typical KYC/AML search is a factual check of recorded data in structured databases. To really ‘know’ a third party, deep contextual background research is required.
Founded by technology experts with decades of experience in intelligence and financial crime, Xapien uses cutting-edge artificial intelligence and natural language processing technologies to emulate the complex process of human-led research.
How is it different?
It is currently difficult, expensive, and time-consuming for organisations to gather meaningful and relevant information on individuals they do business with. Existing risk & compliance tools rely on data sets and cover things like ID Verification, Peps, Sanctions & Watchlist checks, all of which are helpful for tick-box compliance, but don’t actually give you any answers to the more nuanced question of “should I do business with this person”.
For that you would traditionally have a choice: either rely on manual research (in house or outsourced) which costs significant time & money, or bear the risk of onboarding someone without knowing much about them.
With Xapien you don’t have to choose.
Xapien automates the manual research process by researching across the entire indexed internet, and delivering a concise, comprehensive report – just like a human would but at incredible speed. So you can check your AML risks and get a nuanced understanding of your client’s holistic online profile. #xapienthem
What market you are targeting and how big is it?
Background research across the below markets (globally – our product has no jurisdicational limits). Total = £12.85B.
Universities, charities, schools – donor due diligence & prospect research
- Legal – compliance/conflicts
- Private wealth – enhance due diligence
- Insurance – AML/fraud
- Corporates – third-party risk management
- Private equity – enhanced due diligence
This doesn’t even take into account the size of these markets: corporate banking, trade finance, retail and investment banking, recruitment, corporate intelligence.
What’s your business model?
Xapien is a subscription service with tiered pricing based on report usage. We charge annual subscriptions and are modeled on annual recurring revenue targets.
How are you preparing for a potential economic slowdown?
Our B2B product is designed to increase efficiency and drive down costs. This means we are perfectly position to thrive in an economic slowdown, when organisations are looking to cut costs and increase efficiencies.
What was the funding process like?
Challenging, but investors recognized that we could thrive in an economic environment where global businesses are looking to drive down costs and increase efficiencies.
What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital?
Raising capital requires a huge amount of founder attention and time which is challenging for a small organization that is time pressured and needs to focus on growing the product and the customer base.
The due diligence process for funds can be extremely onerous. This also takes a large amount of the businesses’ time and attention.
What factors about your business led your investors to write the cheque?
Our technical “moat”: our proprietary application of Large Language Models combined with our Identity Resolution Engine leads to a uniqurely “business ready” artificial intelligence tool. Whilst ChatGPT has taken the world by storm, it is clear that it cannot be used for regulatory or many other business purposes.
We are a very specific tool that tells you everything you need to know about a person or business – and, everything you can know about them using internet research. This is more challenging than you might think for two core reasons.
The first is the issue of common names. At the beginning of any search, you have to do the research, but you also have to do the analysis. If you search for someone with a common name, you have to unpick ‘is this my guy’? Is this the ‘Joe Bloggs’ I’m looking for?
If you put a common name into most search tools you get millions of results. There is then significant work to analyse, identify and resolve entities. Only then can you summarise what you find.
It is very hard for an automated solution to do that, but we’ve built a tool that uses advanced machine learning and natural language processing models to handle the incredible complexity that comes with resolving identity from mentions across text in articles and structured commercial data whilst seamlessly translating, transliterating and lots more.
It is very hard for an automated solution to do that, but we’ve built a tool that uses advanced machine learning and natural language processing models to handle the incredible complexity that comes with resolving identity from mentions across text in articles and structured commercial data whilst seamlessly translating, transliterating and lots more.
The outcome is fully-automated AI reports about the specific person or organisation that you were interested in, in minutes.
The second issue is traceability. These generative AI models ingest vast amounts of data from disparate sources. Tracing the original source of a tiny fragment of knowledge (a sentence or less) is tough.
This means that most NLP-AI technologies cannot currently demonstrate how they got to an answer.
However, with integrity being a core pillar of the Xapien platform, we source every fact we present to the user, right back to the original records or articles we sourced it from, which is another way we are different from most generative black-box AI tools. This sourcing and traceability are key to pushing beyond generative AI models’ current limitations.
The benefit for our clients: We have arrived to the market at a time when firms seeking to do international business are facing a perfect storm for three reasons.
Emerging ESG considerations present complicated and nuanced risks.
- There is a continuing explosion in publicly available information, and ever-increasing regulation.
There is a global economic downturn.
Our B2B product is designed to increase efficiency and drive down costs. This means we are perfectly position to thrive in an economic slowdown. Xapien is transforming how organisations understand who they’re doing business with enabling them to answer nuanced questions that stem from regulators and the wider public (around ESG risks and more) at speed and scale, to take advantage of the explosion in publicly available information.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
This investment will accelerate our product roadmap, deepen our proprietary application of Large Language Models, enhance our Identity Resolution Engine and turbo-charge our growth in sectors where we are experiencing strong demand, including legal, fintech, insurance, private equity, and philanthropy. It is an important step in our journey to help the world do better business.
More specifically, we aim to more than double our revenues, in line with some major product releases. There’s some really exciting work due in our summer release that will harness generative models to summarise real-world events for our customers, uniquely though, our summaries will be hallucination free and entirely traceable right back to the original content that Xapien found and read.
What advice can you offer companies in London that do not have a fresh injection of capital in the bank?
Look for efficiencies – where can automation help you to drive down costs. Time is money, so if something can be done quicker via automation then jump on that. Prioritisation is critical for a small business. Only focus on what is truly necessary, not just beneficial.
Where do you see the company going now over the near term?
We have big ambitions – exponential growth via our entry into new verticals and a big push into the North American market.
What’s your favorite coffee shop or location to hold a meeting?
Our offices at 120 Moorgate!