Kensho Secures $10 Million in Seed Financing

Kensho, a provider of cloud-based intelligent computer systems, has received $10 million in seed funding. Investors like General Catalyst, NEA, Accel Partners (News - Alert), Google Ventures, Devonshire Investors (the private equity arm affiliated with Fidelity Investments), and other VCs participated.

This VC funding comes mainly for 'Warren,' a virtual marketing research assistant developed by the company. A select set of asset managers and research teams are currently testing Warren. Warren has the ability to reduce research times from days to minutes. Currently, Warren can answer numerous natural language questions on various related topics. This year, Warren will gain the ability to answer 100 million distinct financial questions. Over to you, Mr. researcher.

Although the possibilities of Warren look exciting, it was not easy to build it. Kensho had to first create one of the largest unstructured geopolitical and natural world event databases in the civilian arena to make Warren possible. The company also has technology partnership with NASDAQ OMX. Warren is a professional-grade financial research and analytics platform which has used NASDAQ OMX FinQloud.

Daniel Nadler, CEO of Kensho, commented: "If you look at what Apple is doing with 'Siri,' what IBM (News - Alert) is doing with 'Watson,' and what Google is doing with 'Now,' it is clear that the most powerful technology companies are investing immense resources to make virtual intelligent assistants ubiquitous before the end of the decade. Until now, we haven't seen systems optimized for finance—one of the largest industries in the world.”

In fact, Kensho started using NASDAQ OMX FinQloud in October 2013. NASDAQ OMX FinQloud is a cloud computing platform and it designed specifically for the financial sector. With this Kensho is looking to facilitate its customers to put together large amount of data sets in real-time. It provides advanced distributed computing environments and ground-breaking visualizations to achieve this.