Enterprise natural language processing (NLP) technologies vendor Expert System today secured $ 29.4 million in funding, $ 20 million of which came from institutional investors. (The remaining $ 9.4 million arose through the exercise of shareholder rights.) The company says it plans to use the proceeds to accelerate growth in the U.S. and to develop new tools supporting the creation of AI natural language solutions.
Businesses spend an enormous amount of time and capital processing invoices, order forms, reports, emails, and other such files. According to IDC, 80% of this data will be unstructured by 2025, meaning it will have attributes that make it challenging to search for and analyze. This is expected to contribute to the widespread problem of data-underutilization; Forester reports that between 60% and 73% of data within an enterprise is not currently used for analytics.
Expert System’s flagship software — Cogito Discover — taps AI to perform analytics, extraction, and categorization across taxonomies, making text from XML, RDF, and other formats available for automation and more. Leveraging a natural language understanding (NLU) engine, Cogito Discover reads and identifies what’s contained in a document and attempts to suss out the context, concepts, entities, relationships. It can automatically identify things like people, places, organizations, URLs, emails, phone numbers, dates, values as well as other domain-specific concepts, working in tandem with content management systems and with search engines, archival and case management platforms, robotic process automation solutions, and business intelligence applications.
Cogito can facilitate content enrichment by automating the tagging of topics using both out-of-the-box and customizable metadata. In industries like logistics, the platform can employ the metadata to track sources and find evidence of risks in third-party relationships, monitoring information including data from customer channels to analyze trends and identify potential opportunities.
Beyond Cogito, Expert System offers Clinical Research Navigator, which supports biomedical clients with a platform designed to drive the research of therapies for infectious diseases like COVID-19. The complimentary Medical Intelligence Platform orchestrates the acquisition, search, and exploration of billions of data points related to biological risks. Meanwhile, Cogito for Life Sciences brings together AI and NLP to comprehend scientific literature like publications, patents, clinical trials, and medical reports.
Rounding out Expert System’s portfolio is Cogito for Claims, which uses AI-based NLU to ostensibly mitigate insurance fraud payouts and leakage, speed customer and broker response, and respond to surges in insurance claims without increasing headcount. On the customer service support side, there’s Cogito Answers, which enables “human-like” interactions between customers and internal staff using business to provide answers to common questions. And there’s the Cogito Intelligence Platform, which performs analysis of unstructured data sets to organize information for real-time data workflows by providing actionable insights.
Among Expert System’s clientele are Dow Jones, Zurich, Sanofi, Vodafone, and the U.S. government. In addition, Expert System says it’s worked with Lloyd’s to support the company’s customer support and business process automation initiatives; with ING to build semantic research engine for the web; and with 3M to deploy systems for medical documentation coding and control.
This latest investment in Expert System, which was founded in 1989 and has offices in Modena, Italy and Rockville, Maryland, brings the firm’s total raised to $ 39.2 million in 2020 following the sale of a stake in cyber warfare company CY4Gate a $ 3.5 million capital raise. Coinciding with this week’s news, the company announced the appointment of Colin Matthews as chief revenue officer and Keith C. Lincoln as chief marketing officers.
