Geopolitical risk analytics start-up Cytora, which holds a proprietary real time dataset of risk event data stretching across multiple categories such as social unrest, crime, political violence, strikes, fires and explosions, has raised a second round of funding from investors including Cambridge Enterprise, Parkwalk Advisors and angel investors.
Cambridge Enterprise is the venture arm of Cambridge University, UK, and this latest investment will enable Cytora to drive customer growth in the core markets of supply chain risk management and financial services, and to accelerate development of its event detection technology. Terms of the investment were not disclosed, and the round was oversubscribed.
Cytora’s risk analytics technology is already deployed at some of the largest companies – including airlines and investment banks – and governments. The company is one of only seven firms chosen to participate in the prestigious 2015 FinTech Innovation Lab in London.
The investment comes as organizations are increasingly looking to leverage the power of Web data to manage risk in a more dynamic way. Dataminr, Ban.jo and Kensho are similar companies serving different markets – which have recently raised investment ro
unds.
Using a big data analytics approach, Cytora assembles data about multiple categories of risk in real time, providing customers with a backbone of factual intelligence in which to manage supply chain risk, commodity risk and other risk types.
To do this,Cytora collects raw data from millions of different web sources, detects and geolocates real world events in real time (e.g. port strikes, protests, weather events, fires etc.), and then distributes the data in multiple ways to make it easy to integrate and use. The Cytora event detection engine is flexible and can be used to gather event data about any phenomena that takes place in the physical world.
“All businesses need to identify risks and how to mitigate these,” said Alan Morgan, Chairman of MMC Ventures and one of Cytora’s angel investors. “What is much harder but more valuable is to identify events that will trigger those risks and their propensity and the resulting impact on the business. Cytora does this, and the applications of its capability go beyond national boundaries (e.g. supply chain, airline routes, etc.) and benefit principals as well as intermediaries in the business of risk assessment.”
