US-based financial research platform Sentieo, started by two Indian brothers, raised a $19 million Series A funding led by Centana Growth Partners and other existing investors with a focus to expand its network and business in the India market.

Sentieo’s product is for investors and fund houses that are looking for data beyond revenues and profits.

Built by former Wall Street analysts— Alap Shah and Naman Shah in 2015, Sentieo is a financial research platform that utilises machine learning and natural language processing to instantly provide textual and financial insights for investment management and corporate intelligence clients.

In the last few years, the company has been seen as a competition to global financial data provider Bloomberg L.P’s computer software Bloomberg Terminal that has information about all the listed entities in the major markets, including India.

Talking to Business Line two weeks ago, Naman Shah said that Sentieo is doubling down in the Indian market in terms of business and team due to huge demand coming from several smaller fund houses and investment firms to process data for the listed entities.

At present, Sentieo has a team of 70 engineers, data scientists and sales professionals in India. He did not divulge on the number of clients the company has in the country but added that it has about 700 customers globally including top Hegde Funds, Investment firms and Fortune 500 companies.

“Our idea is to build something that is more friendly, much faster and mature and is also affordable. We want to focus more in India since there are not many players providing financial data on companies. The ones that are present are very expensive,” Shah said referring to Bloomerg Terminal that charges anything over $21,000 (approximately Rs 15 lakhs) per year.

However, compared to Bloomberg Terminals, Sentieo is quite affordable at $500 to $1000 per month or yearly about $12,000 (about Rs 8.7 lakhs per year), Shah said adding that the company is also mulling plans to provide financial data for the big unlisted firms also.

“As a former hedge fund analyst, I experienced firsthand the pain of tracking an ever-increasing list of data sources,” said Alap Shah, CEO and Co-Founder of Sentieo said in a statement adding that the process becomes more difficult when combined with outdated tools for sharing content with teammates and organizing decision-making.

The company’s AI-powered search engine enables its clients to move from data identification to extraction and collaboration in a single web-based, mobile-friendly workflow with deeper insights about a company and the impact it has in a particular sector and overall market.

Sentieo’s search library includes clients’ internal content, financial disclosures from over 40,000 global companies and research from over 1,000 sell-side contributors.

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