London-based startup Quantexa has announced a significant funding round of $175 million, valuing the company at $2.6 billion post-money. This Series F funding round, led by Teachers' Venture Growth (TVG), a division of the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan in Canada, with participation from previous backers British Patient Capital, brings the total amount raised by Quantexa to nearly $550 million.

Quantexa's platform, which employs AI and data analytics, has been instrumental in fighting money laundering and fraud. The company has built a strong reputation, with thousands of users on its platform, including prominent enterprise customers such as Prudential, Vodafone, the U.K. government, HSBC, ABN-AMRO, and Accenture. License revenue has seen a 40% increase in the last year, and the company now operates 16 offices globally with a workforce of around 800 employees.

The funding comes at a critical moment in the enterprise world, where organizations are increasingly adopting AI services to cut costs, improve efficiency, and take on new tasks. However, a significant challenge lies in harnessing the vast amounts of legacy, unstructured data that need to be identified and sorted to train and run these new services. Quantexa's tooling, initially designed to tackle anti-money laundering efforts, has proven equally effective in data curation for AI applications.

Founder and CEO Vishal Marria emphasized the importance of data trust and curation in making AI technology work. "To make AI technology work, you must get the data right. You must be able to trust the data. You must be able to curate the data. And that's what we do," Marria stated in an interview. As a result, Quantexa is shifting its focus to expand its presence in a wider variety of AI projects, while continuing to grow its business in AML and fraud identification.

In line with this strategy, Quantexa is set to "fast track" its partnership with Microsoft, building an AI-powered workload for the Microsoft Fabric data analytics platform and creating an AML solution for U.S. mid-market banks that will be distributed through the Azure Marketplace. The company also plans to expand its work with Databricks, building on a partnership announced in June 2024 to organize billions of data records and power generative AI apps.

Quantexa is also expanding its reach into the public sector, establishing a dedicated business unit to help government bodies leverage structured and unstructured data to build AI services. While Marria remained tight-lipped about the company's involvement in the U.K. government's "Plan for Change" initiative, he highlighted Quantexa's participation in several projects beyond those made public, including an anti-fraud project with the Cabinet Office.

Avid Larizadeh Duggan, senior MD at TVG in EMEA, praised Marria's vision, talent, and exceptional leadership, citing these attributes as key factors in driving this funding round. "Vish himself is quite extraordinary," Duggan said. "He is a founder who comes with a vision but is also a talent magnet, surrounded by exceptional people. Selling into regulated industries is not easy. You can tell he's incredibly personable but also knows what he's talking about. At the back of it, he has a clear understanding of the customer and product."

With this significant funding injection, Quantexa is poised to accelerate its growth and expansion into new areas, solidifying its position as a leader in AI-powered anti-money laundering and data analytics.