Frontline Ventures leads $1.8 mln seed round for Signal

London-based Signal, a market intelligence and information discovery platform, has raised $1.8 million in seed funding. Frontline Ventures led the round with participation from other investors that included Samos Investments and Reed Ventures.

PRESS RELEASE

London, 1st April 2015: London-based market intelligence and information discovery platform Signal (www.signal.uk.com) today announced a seed funding round of $1.8m from top tier investors.

The funding, led by Frontline Ventures, will be used to grow Signal’s team of data scientists, and further develop the platform ahead of a global launch.
Developed in partnership with world-renowned academics in text analytics, natural language processing and machine learning, Signal processes and analyses text from millions of online sources including news sites, blogs, social media and research.

Former Global Head of Product Management at Bloomberg Russel Levi has joined Signal to drive product, sales and content strategies.

Also joining Signal’s CEO David Benigson on the management team are CTO Wesley Hall, whose experience includes senior roles at Gumtree, Fab and eBay; as well as Head of Research Dr Miguel Martinez, a distinguished academic who has published papers on text mining, information retrieval, machine learning and natural language processing.

By scouring over 75,000 news outlets, 3.5 million blogs and 100 social networks, Signal’s technology enables any individual or business to access, analyse and monitor real-time information. Signal users receive highly-tailored feeds on the companies, people, topics and trends that are important to them.

Signal is challenging large legacy solutions in the media monitoring market – the majority of which came to prominence in the Nineties – including the likes of Precise and Cision.

According to Russel Levi, the incumbents haven’t kept pace with the rapid pace of growth in online content.

“The advent of social media has resulted in exponential growth in content creation and distribution,” he says. “With billions of pieces of content produced everyday, companies are finding it increasingly hard to cut through the noise to find the information that will give them a competitive edge.”

Levi’s argument is echoed by Signal founder and CEO David Benigson, who conceived the idea for Signal in 2012: “Business has an information problem. The ever-growing abundance of data available online means it’s never been harder to find the right information at the right time. Our vision is a world in which everyone has at their fingertips the ability to make real-time, data-driven decisions.”

As well as leading the funding round, Frontline Ventures’ William McQuillan has also joined Signal’s board. Both Samos Investments and Reed Ventures are also involved in the funding round, as are a number of high-profile angel investors such as Jon Moulton, founder of Better Capital; Jonathan Goodwin, founder of Lepe Partners; Andrew Jennings, board member at Ted Baker and Myer; Andy Phillipps, former chairman of Toptable.com; Maplin chairman Darren Shapland; Turi Munthe, founder of Demotix; Rahul Powar, creator of Shazam’s iPhone app; and Robin Klein of Index Ventures.

The company’s headquarters are based at London’s Second Home, the iconic new office space founded by Rohan Silva.

More information on Signal:
London-based market intelligence and information discovery platform Signal (http://signal.uk.com) uses predictive analytics to provide actionable, real-time intelligence, drawn from news, social media and other unstructured data, to help clients make better business decisions. It’s easy to use and pricing is transparent from the start.