Kensho
Kensho Secures $10 Million in Seed Financing for ‘Warren,’ an Intelligent Market Research Assistant That Can Answer Complex Financial Questions Posed in Natural Language

DGAP-News: Kensho /

22.01.2014 / 14:56

---------------------------------------------------------------------

General Catalyst, NEA, Accel Partners, Google Ventures, Devonshire/Fidelity
Investments, and Other VCs Participate 

NEW YORK, 2014-01-22 14:56 CET (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) --
Kensho, a pioneer in cloud-based intelligent computer systems capable of
answering complex financial and market research questions posed in natural
language, today announced that it has secured $10 million in seed funding.
Investors from General Catalyst, NEA, Accel Partners, Google Ventures,
Devonshire Investors (the private equity arm affiliated with Fidelity
Investments), and other VCs participated. 'Warren,' the company's
groundbreaking virtual market research assistant, is currently being tested by
a select set of asset managers and research teams. 

Kensho designed Warren to shorten traditional investment research cycles from
days to minutes. The system was built by several veteran software engineers
from Google Inc. and Apple Inc., including one of the original engineers on the
first iPhone team. Warren can currently answer a million distinct types of
natural language questions about the impact of global events on asset prices,
such as, 'What happens to the share prices of energy companies when oil trades
above $100 a barrel and political unrest has recently occurred in the Middle
East?' According to Kensho CTO Pete Kruskall and Kensho Lead Engineer Nicolai
Krakowiak, both former Google software engineers, Warren will be able to answer
100 million distinct types of complex financial questions by the end of 2014. 

Daniel Nadler, CEO of Kensho, commented: 'If you look at what Apple is doing
with 'Siri,' what IBM is doing with 'Watson,' and what Google is doing with
'Now,' it is clear that the most powerful technology companies are investing
immense resources to make virtual intelligent assistants ubiquitous before the
end of the decade. Until now, we haven't seen systems optimized for finance--one
of the largest industries in the world. Kensho is dedicated to the idea that
communicating in natural language with intelligent computer systems which serve
as virtual personal assistants will form the leading edge of global innovation
over the next half-decade, and will transform not just the consumer space, but
industries from medicine and finance to energy and defense as well. We are
delighted to receive continued support from so many premier venture capital
firms and investors, and this funding will significantly expand our capacity to
support a growing number of the best and most experienced engineers in the
world in their development of Warren.' 

Warren currently can answer a million distinct types of natural language
questions about the impact of global events on asset prices, such as: 

  -- 'What happens to the share prices of energy companies when oil trades above
     $100 a barrel and political unrest has recently occurred in the Middle
     East?'
  -- 'What happens to Samsung, the South Korean stock market, and U.S. defense
     stocks in the 48 hours following North Korean nuclear tests and long range
     missile launches?'
  -- 'What happens to Home Depot, home builder stocks, and cement company share
     prices following Category 4 hurricane landfalls in the continental U.S.?'
  -- 'How do credit card company stocks react after the discovery of major
     credit card breaches?'

In order to build Warren, Kensho created one of the largest unstructured
geopolitical and natural world event databases in the civilian arena. Dr. James
Shinn, the former National Intelligence Officer for Asia at the Central
Intelligence Agency and the former Assistant Secretary for Asia in the U.S.
Department of Defense, has joined Kensho's Advisory Board and will help guide
the company in this unprecedented effort outside the intelligence community. 

Dr. Shinn said, 'Event-driven statistical analysis is a remarkably powerful
lens through which to understand the world. The effects of geopolitical events
on assets--such as oil prices, currencies, and foreign and domestic equity
volatility--is one of the least understood areas and, without technology, is one
of the hardest, human-labor intensive, and costliest things to measure, despite
clearly having massive effects on these markets.' 

David Jegen, Managing Director at Devonshire Investors, the private equity arm
affiliated with Fidelity Investments, added, 'Active asset management requires
constant innovation to stay ahead, and we are just beginning to see how
technology will transform existing approaches. Kensho is at the forefront of
bringing next-generation technology to help portfolio managers outperform, and
we are proud to be part of their team. Since its earliest iterations, Kensho's
software has been adding valuable improvements to the research and portfolio
management processes.' 

'The enterprise financial technology built by the industry's legacy players has
not kept up with consumer technology--$500 smartphones are more powerful and
easier to use than the 30 year-old technologies for which financial
institutions currently pay billions of dollars a year,' said Stanley Young,
former CEO of Bloomberg Enterprise, and Kensho Advisory Board member. 'But the
next wave of financial technology innovations, built by firms such as
Kensho--using ultra-modern software paradigms and secure cloud computing--will
bring the accessibility of consumer technology to the enterprise, and put
high-end computational capabilities in the hands of non-programmers. Millions
of hours now wasted on spreadsheet manipulations will be saved, and the
high-priced professionals currently mired in those tasks will be freed to dive
straight into the high-value endeavor of asking important questions and finding
needed answers.' 

Kensho has a long-standing technology partnership with NASDAQ OMX, and Warren
is the first professional-grade financial research and analytics platform built
completely on NASDAQ OMX FinQloud, a secure cloud computing platform designed
exclusively for the financial services sector. 

In honor of the funding announcement, as well as Kensho's deep relationship
with NASDAQ OMX FinQloud, Kensho, Inc. will visit the NASDAQ MarketSite in
Times Square to ring the Closing Bell today. 

About Kensho

Kensho is bringing the intelligent assistant revolution to finance with
user-friendly interactive research environments that combine cloud computing
with graphical user interfaces and natural language querying capabilities,
allowing financial professionals to perform sophisticated empirical analyses in
a fraction of the time spent by institutional research teams today, and without
writing code. The Kensho team is made up of world-class software engineers who
came to Kensho from Google Inc. and Apple Inc. (including one of the original
engineers on the first iPhone team), as well as Wall Street veterans, PhD
physicists, and economists. 

For more information please visit: www.kensho.com.


         CONTACT: Kensho Contact:
         
         Ian Brady
         press@kensho.com
News Source: NASDAQ OMX


End of Corporate News

---------------------------------------------------------------------

22.01.2014 Dissemination of a Corporate News, transmitted by DGAP - a
company of EQS Group AG.
The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement.

DGAP's Distribution Services include Regulatory Announcements,
Financial/Corporate News and Press Releases.
Media archive at www.dgap-medientreff.de and www.dgap.de

---------------------------------------------------------------------


Language:    English        
Company:     Kensho         
 
 
             United States  
ISIN:        US9902971111   
 
 
End of News    DGAP News-Service  
---------------------------------------------------------------------  
249140 22.01.2014