Relative Insight, as the industry leader in text analytics, are delighted to announce the completion of a £5m funding round with YFM Equity Partners (YFM) through its managed British Small Companies VCTs.

This growth capital investment from YFM will be used to drive Relative Insight’s expansion in the US, as well as accelerating product development to create significant value for their customers.

Relative Insight’s technology was originally developed to catch criminals masquerading as children online. Now, the platform is leveraged by global brands and agencies to highlight critical differences in consumer and brand language, driving deeper insights into digital marketing, consumer analytics and customer experience.

As volumes of available text data grows exponentially, brands are looking for innovative technology solutions like Relative Insight to analyse their surveys, reviews, social and voice of the customer data. Their technology has been designed to find actionable insights in text data quickly, efficiently and at scale.

Relative Insight’s partnership with YFM will enable to grow international customer base and develop the platform to provide even greater insights and data integrations for their clients.

Ben Hookway, CEO of Relative Insight commented: "With an ever-increasing amount of data available to businesses, many are struggling to make sense of this valuable information. This can prove vital in understanding what is causing business outcomes, and what can be done to change them. Our platform is able to rapidly analyse millions of words and compare them across a range of variables to highlight the critical differences in consumer language, helping to explain market trends, customer behaviour and provide actionable insight including making communication more effective with target audiences. Having seen rapid growth over the last four years, the business is now embarking on the next stage of its journey as we expand in the US. We believe that YFM is the ideal partner to support us. As well as having an established track record scaling SaaS business, they have a real understanding of our market and are a great fit culturally – we like the team and are confident they will add real value.”

YFM has a growing national portfolio of software and tech businesses, including data transformation software company Matillion and innovation intelligence provider Vypr.

Dan Freed, partner at YFM, added: “Data and text analytics is a rapidly expanding market and one with huge potential given the ever-increasing demand for improved business intelligence, and customer insights. The Relative Insight platform is a compelling proposition helping companies to understand why things happen. The heritage of the business resonates with us, and we believe it is a best-in-class platform led by an experienced and very impressive management team.”

Eddie Harding, Partner at ICON Corporate Finance, said: “We’re delighted to have advised Ben and the team on this transaction and were not surprised by the strong level of interest we received from investors. Relative Insight’s highly innovative AI-based text analytics software generates significant value for its clients, and the company is now at a very exciting stage in its growth plan. This funding from YFM will help Relative Insight to scale up its operations considerably, and in particular in the US where there is significant market potential.”

Relative Insight’s mission is to help organisations see text data as the future of business intelligence. This funding will enable us to enhance our product offering and deliver on the demand for advanced text analytics technology, providing businesses with crucial insights to understand their audiences and competitors.

SOURCE Relative Insight