Shantel
Xapien, the deep tech platform transforming how organisations understand who they’re doing business with, today announced that it has closed a £4.5M round led by YFM Equity Partners and backed by D2 Fund, concluding total seed funding of £6M.
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.
The company’s rapid growth since its commercial launch in January 2022 underpinned the competitive round led by YFM Equity Partners and backed by D2 Fund alongside existing investors. The proceeds will be used to accelerate product development and go-to-market, expand into new verticals and extend their US footprint.
Chris Green, Xapien CEO, said: “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. Current methods will not scale, but there is a better way.”
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.
David Wrench, partner at YFM, said: “Xapien has demonstrated impressive growth over the past 12 months. The high calibre management team has a well-defined vision and plan to grow the business further.
They have built technology that is providing demonstrable ROI to its customers. What today takes days when produced manually can be done in minutes through Xapien.”
Xapien automates an otherwise manual research process to deliver an executive-level report on any person or organisation, anywhere in the world in minutes. Full sourcing of all information gives greater assurance whilst driving major efficiencies for organisations in many sectors, including law firms, financial services institutions and philanthropy.
Whether used for client onboarding, investment due diligence, compliance, reputational and integrity due diligence, donor prospect research and more, the technology provides a competitive edge.
Amory Poulden, Managing Partner at D2 Fund commented: “Understanding who you are doing business with is a time-consuming and uncertain undertaking. Xapien’s solution delivers clarity amongst the noise, allowing companies to perform radically faster and more accurate searches on individuals and companies. We were impressed by what Chris, Dan, Shaun and the rest of the Xapien team have built so far and are looking forward to working with them as they scale the business from here.
Chris continued, “YFM and D2 Fund really understand the market that we are serving and share our vision to transform it using AI and deep technology.
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.”
The YFM team included David Wrench, Zach Francis and Jamie Roberts.
The D2 Fund team included: Amory Poulden and Joshua Minsk.
YFM and Management team were advised by:
Legal: HCR, Financial: PKF Francis Clark; Organisational: Sonia Allinson-Penny and Ian McDonald; Technical: Leckie Kershaw; Sales and marketing: Emerse; VCT Advice: Philip Hare & Associates.
About Xapien
Founded by deep technology experts with decades of experience in intelligence and financial crime, Xapien applies cutting edge artificial intelligence and natural language processing to deliver on-demand research for businesses seeking to truly understand their third parties.
Xapien’s SaaS platform is transforming how the world deals with third parties. It enables anyone to know who they are in business with, a capability available until now only to organisations with significant resources.
For more information visit www.xapien.com
About YFM
YFM invests £2m to £10m into businesses with strong growth potential located across the UK through a regional network of offices in London, Leeds, Manchester, Reading and Birmingham.
YFM Equity Partners are specialist, independently owned, private equity investors. Having recently celebrated 40 years of investing experience, our portfolio may have changed over the years, but our ethos has remained the same – to support small businesses across the UK in their next phase of growth. We seek to unlock value and growth potential by providing up to £10 million of equity to fuel the development of established business throughout the UK regions. We do this by helping our portfolio companies launch new initiatives, make transformative acquisitions, and upgrade technologies and systems. We are dedicated to working alongside management teams to create long-term value for our investors, the companies we invest in, and make a positive economic impact for the communities in which we work. We manage funds in excess of £420 million which include venture capital trusts and private equity funds.
YFM Equity Partners conducts its investment business through its subsidiary YFM Private Equity Limited which is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FRN: 122120).
For more information, please visit www.yfmep.com
About D2 Fund
D2 is a specialised early-stage venture capital fund that invests in B2B software companies with robust technical moats, founder-market fit, and a capital-efficient business model. Their typical investment size ranges from £250k to £1m, with a focus on supporting emerging businesses in their early growth stages.
For more information, please visit www.d2.fund
