Making the world's expertise available using AI — our investment in techspert.io
We are delighted to announce Nauta Capital’s latest investment in Cambridge-based techspert.io, the first AI-driven platform connecting consultants, investors and corporates with primary expert knowledge in a fully automated manner. Nauta led the company’s £3.8m Series A round, alongside existing investors including Cambridge Angels and Angel Co Fund.
The knowledge explosion and why one call can make a big difference
As data-driven investors it is critical for us to rapidly gain a deep understanding of industries and startups to invest in. As part of that we are constantly reminded of two facts:
- The explosion of available and relevant knowledge for nearly any domain and industry in times of big data — efficient access to the right insights is a critical differentiator.
- The importance of expert knowledge to truly understand a subject. Whereby often only one call with a topic expert can save you hours, or even days of painstaking research.
If you take this to the next level and think about the key players in the knowledge economy, such as strategy consultants, investors or most corporates for that matter, then you start grasping the depth of the challenge but also the opportunity to make expert insight available in an efficient and automated manner to all kinds of decisions makers.
A $5bn industry in need of change
Expert insights is a $5bn market and growing. But current, highly manual approaches by incumbent providers of primary research and expert connections are insufficient and as a recent report calls out:
The industry has not introduced any significant technological changes
It can take days and several calls and e-mails to manually find, onboard and schedule the right expert, experts available are often limited to a fixed pool of “regulars” and might overlook better suited experts completely. In short customer needs are not met in the best possible manner, and critical decisions are delayed or are made without the most important insights available.
Redefining primary research and expert networks, using AI
This is something that the two founders of techspert.io David Holden-White and Graham Mills experienced first-hand and set out to change when founding techspert.io in 2016. Based on their own expertise as consultants and researchers particularly in the Lifesciences space they recognised the opportunity to use advanced machine learning techniques to efficiently map the world’s expertise and dynamically pinpoint the most qualified and relevant expert on a given topic, irrespective of subject or geography. Joined by CTO Hari Jackson — an AI expert with advanced degrees from the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford — the team soon launched the first completely AI-enabled expert knowledge platform delivering a 10x improvement in the three areas of precision, global coverage, customer convenience and of course 100% compliance.
Globally growing customer and expert base
techspert.io is already serving consultants, investors and corporates, particularly in the Life Sciences and Financial sectors across UK, US and Europe but with increasing inbound interest from all different domains and geographies. The best experts available are identified and on-boarded globally, with more than 20 million experts already covered.
Outstanding team + capital efficient growth + deeptech moat
When I first met the techspert.io team (of course at a machine learning event), I was captivated by their deep tech approach and ambition to map the world’s expertise on their platform, combining some of the best traits from Google (search) and Linkedin (network). The founders built a fast-growing AI platform out of their (fun) Cambridge office, hiring top-notch tech talent and already expanding into the US. Growing in a capital-efficient manner and falling into both our “Network Effects” and “Data-driven Enterprise Transformation” investment themes made them a very natural addition to our portfolio of companies; many having AI at their core.
Geographic, customer-vertical and product-led growth
With this investment, techspert.io is advancing its product and technology edge and is in full swing to open their New York office later this year and to grow into other industry verticals. Already covering millions of experts with the techspert.io knowledge graph we are extremely excited about other customer applications that their technology will enable.
We are thrilled to back Graham, David and Hari and the entire techspert.io team on their journey — Welcome to the Nauta Family!
Interested in joining the next Cambridge AI leader? Check out techspert.io’s open positions here.
