Edison Partners has led a financing of New York City-based Predata, a provider of predictive event intelligence used by hedge funds, corporate security officers, and government agencies to forecast geopolitical risk throughout the world.
Chicago Ventures and Conversion Capital also participated in the round. The investment will fuel continued product innovation and go-to-market expansion.
Using open-source intelligence (OSINT), the Predata platform enables organisations to collect and visualise tens of thousands of digital conversations from a range of social and collaborative media channels on a daily basis. Regressing this data against historical datasets allows Predata to quantify the probabilistic nature of various destabilising event types in more than 200 countries.
“Predata is revolutionising the predictive analytics landscape with its unique use of social conversation data and next generation machine learning that provides much more lead time than other solutions to take action prior to an event occurring,” says Chris Sugden, Managing Partner at Edison Partners. “We applaud the team for what they have accomplished to date and are thrilled to be a part of the next phase of the journey.”
With this investment, Sugden joins the company’s board of directors.
“This milestone highlights Predata’s success and opportunity in leading the predictive intelligence category with a differentiated approach to addressing the assessment of political, financial and market risk,” says James Shinn, CEO at Predata. “Chris and the Edison team bring much more than capital; their deep industry expertise, large network, and operating expertise made them the ideal partner as we drive further into the finance, corporate, and intelligence markets.”
Predata is the tenth investment for Edison’s latest fund, Edison Partners VIII, which closed last month. It is also the firm’s thirty-ninth investment by its Financial Technology practice. Notable exits include Edgetrade, FolioDynamix, GAIN Capital, Liberty Tax and Princeton Financial. Current investments include: BFS Capital, Billtrust, Clearpool Group, Compliance Science, OptionsCity, Scivantage and Trader Tools
