Sesamm, a French company that uses natural language processing to analyse digital content in order to help financial organisations and business meet their environmental, social and governance goals, has gained €35 million (equivalent to $37 million) in investment funds for the development of their business abroad.
Although there is opposition to ESG efforts from certain politicians and corporate leaders, firms are still aware of the reputational and financial risks that come with not taking into account their environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) duties – this applies to operations within their business and any external companies they partner with.
Considering this, Sesamm offers a way to companies to monitor text-based information from all over the web, like news outlets, NGO documents, and social media sites. This information can then be transformed into beneficial knowledge.
refers to the activities involved in getting products or services to a customer.
The term “supply chain” is used to describe the process of taking goods or services from their origin to the final purchaser.
Set up in 2014 in Paris, Sesamm has an encompassing customer list from the finance world, including U.S. venture powerhouse Carlyle Group, Natixis from France that does investment banking, Japanese conglomerate Tokio Marine for insurance, and British asset manager Unigestion.
Firms are able to utilize Sesamm’s leading product, TextReveal, in numerous ways, including utilizing their API to place Sesamm’s natural language processing engine in their own programs. Additionally, Sesamm provides a web-based dashboard with data analysis, graphical depictions, and alert notifications for different due diligence, regulatory compliance and ESG applications.
As an illustration, businesses seeking to trace the developments of their supply chain associates can employ Sesamm to monitor anything connected to such colleagues which appears in the public arena, such as any emerging illicit proceedings or legal disputes. This allows them to promptly take action as soon as they receive an alert from Sesamm – these ESG warnings, which were launched by Sesamm a short while ago, can be delivered either through email or as part of a system integration, such as a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software.
Other private equity firms can take advantage of Sesamm’s services to examine properties they may be interested in buying or investing in. Sesamm has a twenty billion article data store where it utilizes NLP technologies to detect references to all types of companies. The data is arranged and organized into easy-to-navigate dashboards.
Sylvain Forté, the co-founder and CEO of Sesamm, told TechCrunch that private equity firms normally rely on consulting firms to assess potential target companies. However, he noted that this process is expensive and the outcomes can be imperfect since gathering all the necessary data on the web is virtually impossible. As a result, the conclusions they come to are not always accurate.
Nevertheless, Sesamm can be customized to meet any specification, for example it could be used to determine a competitor’s prominence in the marketplace, or any other subject matter which is important to a business.
Forté mentioned that they are currently putting a lot of focus on ESG related applications, but they also offer insights into a range of data including sentiment towards specific brands, how stocks and indices are performing, the public’s opinion on a company’s leaders, and web-based information about economic indicators like inflation.
Forté states that Sesamm utilizes large language models, similar to ChatGPT’s, which is currently a popular artificial intelligence creation. It uses various sets of data and refines the algorithms on its own datasets, which are labeled in more than a hundred languages.
Forté mentioned that Sesamm works with a large number of sources, containing more than 20 billion pieces of information in 100 languages and 14 years of historical info. These include carefully examined news companies, professional blogs, and social media platforms. Additionally, it oversees permits for exclusive data sources from premium news outlets.
Sesamm has a large number of strongly-backed competitors, consisting of AlphaSense (whose market value was $1.7 billion in 2020) and Dataminr (valued at $4.1 billion as of now). Additionally, fact-finding giant FactSet, which is worth $15 billion, entered the sphere of AI-based ESG information when it purchased Truvalue Labs three years ago.
Despite the hoopla around ChatGPT and the proliferation of corporate ESG pledges, the large sum of capital raised by Sesamm when investors appear to have kept their money close suggests a tale of its own.
Despite difficult economic times, Sesamm has been successful in securing a considerable sum of money which demonstrates the demands for the company’s open attention to the two major tendencies of artificial intelligence and sustainability. Their services provide those looking for information about ESG on both public and private companies of various kinds with more accuracy and detailed results.
Sesamm has now brought in a total of about â¬15 million ($16 million) with their additional investment called the Series B2 – that saw the involvement of both new and past investors. These investors included Opera Tech Ventures, Elaia (VC firms), Carlyle Group, Unigestion, Elevator Ventures of Raiffeisen Bank International, AFG Partners, CEGEE Capital and New Alpha Asset Management. Many are customers of the startup.
Sesamm announced that they intend to use their newfound investment to develop into the U.S. and Asian markets.
