London-based artificial intelligence startup Signal Media Ltd., better known as Signal AI, today announced it raised $165 million in new growth-equity funding led by Battery Ventures.
Following this investment, Battery Ventures will acquire a majority stake in Signal AI and support the company through its next phase of growth. Existing investors Highland Europe, Mercuri and MMC Ventures retain minority positions.
Founded in 2013, the company’s platform uses machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence to proactively detect risk and reputation “signals” from external sources. Signal AI ingests data from 226 markets in 75 languages, including news articles, TV news, podcasts, regulatory filings and social media platforms — from mainstream channels to fringe platforms — to help organizations stay ahead of change and understand complex relationships between businesses, people and issues.
In an interview with SiliconANGLE, Signal AI Chief Executive David Benigson said that the company differentiates itself in the market with access to premium compliant data that others don’t have, combined with the precision of its AI models.
“Our vision and mission as a business is, as we describe it, to redefine risk and reputation intelligence,” said Benigson. “And what we mean by that is, in this increasingly complex and volatile world where the number of risks and issues seems to be growing exponentially, we’re trying to help our clients get a window to the outside world.”
He added that while enterprise technology has long focused on managing internal data and workflows, far less attention has gone toward understanding external risks and reputational threats that can have just as much impact on a business.
“A lot of the threats companies are grappling with come from outside of their business, not from within,” Benigson said, adding that many companies lack tools for dealing with external risk and reputational threats.
The platform enables decision makers to identify emerging risks, benchmark against peers and competitors, and take action before events escalate into reputational or financial damage. Customers include Diageo plc, NetApp Inc., Volvo Car Corp., Bloomberg L.P. and Uber Technologies Inc.
The company said it plans to grow its risk intelligence product development and expand its reach across the United States, Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
The investment follows two successful acquisitions by Signal AI, including corporate reputation management platform Kelp Inc. in 2022 and advanced reputation intelligence monitoring firm Social 360 in 2024.
Signal AI’s latest product launch, Ask AIQ, allows business leaders and executives to get answers to highly complex business questions based on intelligence gathered and curated by the company’s AI engine. It uses retrieval-augmented generation to surface patterns and trends from large volumes of data. Users can ask questions in natural language regarding risk, sentiment and more.
Common applications for Ask AIQ include finding answers to complex problems that may impact the company and analyzing customer sentiment. For example, a user could ask, “What are the trends around generative AI and copyright risks?” or “Who had the best sentiment across my competitors in US-based sources?”
Ask AIQ returns highly detailed answers in seconds, incorporating rich visualizations supporting its conclusions and data analysis to permit rapid response to potential reputational threats and emerging opportunities.
“Signal AI has carved out a differentiated and, we feel, highly defensible market position at the intersection of AI, risk and enterprise software,” said Collier Searle, a principal at Battery who is joining Signal AI’s board. “We’re backing an exceptional team with a bold vision to become the central nervous system for risk-aware organizations.”
Benigson said the company is developing predictive risk intelligence, using its blend of discriminative and generative AI to connect signals and anticipate threats before they escalate. He added that he sees it as part of the next stage of building “decision intelligence” tools, where AI agents don’t just highlight risks but recommend responses and actions.
“I believe, very fundamentally, that this risk intelligence market needs to take shape, that every organization should have a chief risk officer and that every chief risk officer should have a tool like Signal AI in their hands to get ahead of external risks and threats in a more predictive and preemptive way,” said Benigson.