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Signal AI, the British tech company chaired by Archie Norman, has raised $165mn in a funding round led by US tech investor Battery Ventures to expand its media monitoring and risk management business globally.
The company has struck content licensing deals with most of the world’s top media groups, including the Financial Times, and social media companies, giving it access to articles, as well as podcasts and broadcast content.
It scans this material to produce reports for its more than 650 clients, including Diageo, Volvo and Uber, who use them to understand what is being written and said about their company, as well as their rivals and the wider sector.
The information also enables companies to detect early warning signs of potential problems — including cyber attacks — and inform strategic decisions.
Signal counts many PR and management consultants as clients, but also offers a service that in effect replaces some of their more labour intensive operations in media monitoring and risk analysis.
London-based Signal plans to use the new funds for acquisitions and product development, as well as expanding across both the US and Europe. Battery will hold a majority stake in Signal after the investment.
David Benigson, Signal founder and chief executive, said that as well as having access to “pretty much all the global tier-one content around the world”, Signal also scours industry specific publications and local content across 200 markets and nearly 100 languages.
The company uses discriminative AI — models that classify information — and then applies generative AI to produce analysis for clients.
Signal also examines dozens of social media channels and “a number of fringe and alt media sites that have become increasingly influential”, Benigson said, including Telegram and Discord.
He added that tracking these channels — which are “not necessarily where our corporate clients are listening and spending their time” — can help companies identify emerging cyber threats, as well as disinformation and misinformation campaigns.
The UK government uses Signal’s platform to benchmark reputational risk across agencies and programmes, while accounting firms have used the company’s analysis in their audits of companies.
In the year to March 2024, Signal made £23mn in revenue, up from £19mn in 2023, and a pre-tax loss of £14mn, narrower than £21mn the year before. Benigson said Signal was now profitable at the pre-tax level.
Before this funding round, Signal had raised about $100mn in total from investors including Aberdeen, Hearst and Guardian Media Group Ventures, which is now known as Mercuri. The company was advised by Evercore on its latest fundraise.
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