Xapien closes a £4.5m round led by YFM Equity Partners

13 April 2023: Deep-tech firm pioneering the use of Large Language Models for Third Party Risk concludes total seed funding of £6m to expand into new verticals and extend US footprint. The round was led by YFM Equity Partners and backed by D2 alongside existing investors.

Described as “the ChatGPT of Due Diligence”, Xapien is transforming how organisations understand who they’re doing business with.

The company’s rapid growth since its commercial launch in January 2022 underpinned the competitive round.

Xapien delivers an executive-level report on any person or organisation, anywhere in the world in minutes. Every piece of information is fully sourced, enabling confident, auditable decision making.

Founded by technology experts with decades of experience in intelligence and financial crime, Xapien uses cutting edge artificial intelligence and natural language processing technologies to emulate the complex process of human-led research.

Chris Green, Xapien CEO, said: “Every year, billions of dollars are wasted on laborious and time-consuming background research.

“Firms seeking to do international business are facing a perfect storm. Emerging ESG considerations present complicated and nuanced risks. There is a continuing explosion in publicly available information, and ever-increasing regulation.

“This creates an increasing need for organisations to really ‘know’ their third parties. This includes their customers, suppliers, donors, applicants and investors.

“Put simply, firms can no longer afford to just ask ‘can we’ be in business with someone. They must also ask ‘should we’?

“Traditional screening tools cannot answer this nuanced question. A typical KYC/AML search is a factual check of recorded data in structured databases. To really ‘know’ a third party, deep contextual background research is required.

Current methods will not scale, but there is a better way.”

Xapien automates an otherwise manual research process, delivering concise, meaningful reports on any individual or organisation, anywhere in the world, in just a few minutes. This gives greater assurance whilst driving major efficiencies for organisations in many sectors, including law firms, financial services institutions and philanthropic organisations.

Whether used for client onboarding, investment due diligence, compliance, reputational and integrity due diligence, donor prospect research and more, Xapien provides a competitive edge.

David Wrench, partner at YFM, said:

“Xapien has demonstrated impressive growth over the past 12 months. The high calibre management team has a well-defined vision and plan to grow the business further.

“They have built technology that is providing demonstrable ROI to its customers. What today takes days when produced manually can be done in minutes through Xapien.”

Chris continued, “YFM and D2 really understand the market that we are serving and share our vision to transform it using AI and deep technology.

“This investment will accelerate our product roadmap, deepen our proprietary application of Large Language Models, enhance our Identity Resolution Engine and turbo-charge our growth in sectors where we are experiencing strong demand, including legal, fintech, insurance, private equity, and philanthropy. It is an important step in our journey to help the world do better business.”

The YFM team included David Wrench, Zach Francis and Jamie Roberts.

The D2 Team included: Amory Poulden and Joshua Minsk.

YFM and Management team were advised by:

Legal: HCR, Financial: PKF Francis Clark; Organisational: Sonia Allinson-Penny and Ian McDonald; Technical: Leckie Kershaw; Sales and marketing: Emerse; VCT Advice: Philip Hare & Associates.

About Xapien

Founded by deep technology experts with decades of experience in deep technology, intelligence and financial crime, Xapien applies cutting edge artificial intelligence and natural language processing to deliver on-demand research for businesses seeking to truly understand their third parties.

Xapien’s SaaS platform is transforming how the world deals with third parties. It enables anyone to know who they are in business with, a capability available until now only to organisations with significant resources.

For more information visit www.xapien.com or follow us on LinkedIn

About YFM

YFM invests £2m to £10m into businesses with strong growth potential located across the UK through a regional network of offices in London, Leeds, Manchester, Reading and Birmingham.

YFM Equity Partners are specialist, independently owned, private equity investors. Having recently celebrated 40 years of investing experience, our portfolio may have changed over the years, but our ethos has remained the same – to support small businesses across the UK in their next phase of growth. We seek to unlock value and growth potential by providing up to £10m of equity to fuel the development of established business throughout the UK regions. We do this by helping our portfolio companies launch new initiatives, make transformative acquisitions, and upgrade technologies and systems. We are dedicated to working alongside management teams to create long-term value for our investors, the companies we invest in, and make a positive economic impact for the communities in which we work. We manage funds in excess of £420m which include venture capital trusts and private equity funds.

YFM Equity Partners conducts its investment business through its subsidiary YFM Private Equity Limited which is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FRN: 122120).

For more information, please visit www.yfmep.com or follow us on LinkedIn.

About D2

D2 is a specialised early-stage venture capital fund that invests in B2B software companies with robust technical moats, founder-market fit, and a capital-efficient business model. Their typical investment size ranges from £250k to £1m, with a focus on supporting emerging businesses in their early growth stages.

For more information, please visit https://www.d2.fund or follow us on LinkedIn.

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