Aylien Rides The AI Wave
Aylien spent the better part of ten years honing and refining its artificial intelligence products before it hit pay dirt in February 2023, when it was scooped up by British firm Quantexa. Founder Parsa Ghaffari was only 34 years old when the exit was effected, and how he came to base his venture in Ireland is a story in itself.
Ghaffari travelled to China in 2012 to take part in an accelerator programme run by Sean O’Sullivan, the Irish-American tech investor behind venture firm SOS Ventures. Meeting O’Sullivan and building connections with his firm led to Ghaffari moving to Dublin to incorporate Aylien Ltd in 2012.
Aylien specialises in natural language processing, or NLP, which is the use of artificial intelligence to analyse and make sense of huge swathes of data. The practice has uses in several industries, and the latest iteration of Aylien’s product is aimed at news. Customers of the Aylien API can gather data across 80,000 different sources and in multiple languages, and many customers use this data to stay on top of business risks.
Aylien’s early days were funded with loans from SOSV, and in 2015 – three years after launch – the company had seven staff and Ghaffari was paid a salary of €38,000. Sean O’Sullivan was sufficiently impressed that his hunch was working out that in 2016 SOSV invested €440k in a share allotment, with Enterprise Ireland investing €250k.
The business expanded to 13 people in 2017 and the annual loss increased to €1.2m. This was made possible by fresh funding of €2m, with University Bridge Fund paying €1m to join the share register, SOSV chipping in another €550k, and taxpayers forking up an additional €400k through EI.
The start-up’s largest funding round was in 2019. University Bridge Fund doubled down with another €1.4m while Dutch investor Finch Capital came on board with €4m. Enterprise Ireland kept the faith with another €300k in February 2021, although Aylien’s average headcount declined from 29 to 23 employees through the year. The final funding round before the company was sold was in December 2021, with the BVP EIIS Fund parted with €1.1m.
Aylien’s filed accounts for 2021 disclose total equity raised of €9.8m and convertible loan note funding of €1.3m. The complications of the funding journey are reflected in the company’s December 2021 amended constitution, which runs to 43 pages.
Though the Quantexa consideration was not disclosed, presumably Aylien’s backers came out handsomely ahead, including the founder, for whom moving to Ireland turned out of the best decision of his young life.
Aylien, under its new owners, now finds itself at the centre of the tech industry’s hottest trend. Quantexa, which styles itself as a global leader in Decision Intelligence, says it plans to invest c.€145m in AI over the next three years, including its AI Innovation Centre in London. This prospect helped Quantexa raise €140m from investors in 2021, and Aylien was its first acquisition.
As for Ghaffari, now working with Quantexa: “Timing is everything. This can’t be more true for a young start-up building a product that never existed before,” he commented recently.