London-based Eigen Technology closes Series B round at $42 million

With an additional $5 million investment from ING Ventures, London-based Eigen Technologies has sealed its Series B round at $42 million, after an initial close last November. The round was led by Lakestar and Dawn Capital, with Temasek and Goldman Sachs Growth Equity also participating.

Eigen’s natural language processing (NLP) technology helps companies parse documents, or huge quantities of unstructured data, into useful information and insights. The differentiator is what co-founder and CEO Lewis Liu calls a “small data” approach — Eigen’s AI system needs only a few data examples to get started, as opposed to other machine learning systems which require hundreds or thousands. The startup’s focus has been on sectors that are mired with nuanced regulations, legal terms, and lots of paperwork: finance first, followed by moves into insurance and healthcare. The London company claims its NLP technology is used by 25 percent of the world’s largest banks, plus global firms such as Allen & Overy and Deloitte. Indeed, new investor ING also uses Eigen’s technology in areas such as LIBOR replacement and loan operations. In a press release, the two companies said that by working together, they aim to speed up the development of use cases in areas such as trade finance and SME banking. ING will help Eigen create NLP models tailored to the financial industry. Benoît Legrand, CEO of ING Ventures, explained the mutual benefits of the partnership: “Eigen offers a strategic capability in the intelligent operations domain, deployed in use cases across retail as well as wholesale banking. This partnership will allow both companies to work closer together when implementing use cases through data and process analysis, so as to accelerate Eigen’s advantage in NLP as well as ING’s digital transformation.”    

ING is the second strategic investor that Eigen has brought on board, alongside Goldman Sachs, another Eigen client who co-led the startup’s Series A round in 2018. The company has raised over $60 million to date.