Quantexa nabs $175M at a $2.6B valuation to double down on data analytics for AI | TechCrunch

London startup Quantexa has made its name over the years with an enterprise platform that employs AI and data analytics to fight money laundering and fraud. Today, it is announcing new funding of $175 million to double down on that business while also moving deeper into another hot area: using its technology to help organizations understand and better use data across various silos to build and run AI services.

The funding, a Series F, values Quantexa at $2.6 billion post-money — a significant jump on Quantexa’s last valuation of $1.8 billion in 2023. Teachers’ Venture Growth (TVG), division of the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan in Canada, with participation also from previous backers British Patient Capital. The startup has raised just under $550 million to date, per PitchBook data.

The funding is coming at a flush moment for the nine year-old startup. The company says it has “thousands of users” on its platform (an imprecise number that hasn’t changed in years), and its list large enterprise customers includes the likes of Prudential, Vodafone, the U.K. government, HSBC, ABN-AMRO, and Accenture. License revenue is up 40% in the last year, and it now has 16 offices globally with some 800 employees.

Quantexa’s funding is also coming at a key moment in the world of enterprise.

Organizations across both the private and public sectors are collectively making a big drive to adopt more AI services — the hope being that this will help them cut costs, speed up how people work, and take on new kinds of work. 

There is a small hitch, however. In many cases, those same organizations are sitting on huge troves of legacy, unstructured data that need to be identified and sorted to train and run those new services. 

Quantexa’s tooling was built to tap into unstructured data troves in aid of anti-money laundering efforts. But it turns out to be equally useful for data curation for AI applications. Quantexa has been building out the latter business for a few years; and now with the huge demand for AI, it becoming a growing focus for the company.

“To make AI technology work, you must get the data right. You must be able to trust the data. You must be able to curate the data. And that’s what we do,” founder and CEO Vishal Marria said in an interview.

The company continues to see a lot of business in AML and fraud identification, but it will be growing that business in tandem with larger efforts to expand its presence in a wider variety of AI projects.

In line with that, Quantexa said it would “fast track” a partnership it inked with Microsoft in November: it is building an AI-powered workload for the Microsoft Fabric data analytics platform; and it will build an AML solution for U.S. mid-market banks that will be distributed through the Azure Marketplace. 

For those opting for Databricks, Marria said the plan is to do more work in that environment, too, building on a partnership announced in June 2024 between the companies to use Quantexa’s technology to organise billions of data records to build and power generative AI apps.

Another area where it will be expanding its reach is in the public sector, specifically with an enlarged dedicated business unit that will help government bodies use “structured and unstructured data” to build AI services. In its home market of the U.K., 

Marria would not comment on what work it is doing around the government’s big AI push (dubbed “Plan for Change”). But he pointed out that the company was involved in several projects beyond those that have been made public (such as this anti-fraud project it undertook with the Cabinet Office). 

It’s that traction plus Marria’s convincing push for growth at a time when so much is changing in the industry and the world, which have driven this particular round. 

“Vish himself is quite extraordinary,” said Avid Larizadeh Duggan, the senior MD who runs TVG in EMEA, said in an interview. “He is a founder who comes with a vision but is also a talent magnet, surrounded by exceptional people. Selling into regulated industries is not easy. You can tell he’s incredibly personable but also knows what he’s talking about. At the back of it, he has a clear understanding of the customer and product. All of these attributes incredibly important when you invest, but for me I feel a sense that it’s even more important when the sands are shifting so quickly.”