Kensho, a US-based developer of artificial intelligence (AI) technology that is backed by internet company Google, secured $15m on Monday in a series A round led by investment bank Goldman Sachs.
Goldman Sachs is now the largest single investor in the company, and will implement the technology in its own firm as part of a strategic partnership.
Kensho has developed an AI assistant dubbed Warren. The software is able to provide statistical and analytical computing in real time, providing investors with instantaneous answers to complex financial questions asked in plain English.
The company raised $10m in a seed round in January 2014 from backers including Google Ventures, Google’s corporate venturing unit, Devonshire Investors, which acts as the venture capital arm of financial services corporation Fidelity Investments, and VC firms New Enterprise Associates, Accel Partners and General Catalyst Partners.
According to a regulatory filing, the company also raised almost $500,000 of debt financing in January 2014.
Daniel Nadler, chief executive of Kensho, said: “We are proud to partner with Goldman Sachs around the vision that real-time statistical computing systems and scalable analytics architectures represent the next-generation of improvements to the global financial system.”