We’re excited to share that LiveOak Ventures led the $5M Seed in Perigon. This investment is a testament to the significant market opportunity, the quality of the team, and the strength of Perigon’s contextual intelligence capabilities.
In today’s fast-paced and ever-changing world, content generation across the web is happening at an unprecedented rate. This content comes from a myriad of sources, ranging from ultra-local and niche to global publishers. As a result, there has been a diffusion of what is considered authoritative and conclusive on any given topic. At the same time, there is an even greater thirst for such content by both consumers and business practitioners. With so much information available and so many sources to vet, it can be challenging for businesses in particular to sort through the noise and extract signals to drive decisions. Insert Perigon.
In mathematics, a perigon is an angle of 360°. True to its name, Perigon’s technology aims to redefine how businesses scour sources comprehensively and contextually to uncover insights that might otherwise go unnoticed. Through a proprietary process that extracts raw data from millions of inputs and data sources daily and then filters, enriches, clusters, and summarizes, Perigon is able to distill terabytes of data into structured, real-time feeds with API access and help ultimately drive actionable decisions. Perigon already serves over 70 customers across a range of industries including financial services, supply chain, government, and media.
We are thrilled to partner with a stellar team that is uniquely positioned to tackle this problem. Joshua Dziabiak, CEO and co-founder of Perigon, is the definition of a serial entrepreneur. Having founded his first startup at age 14, Perigon is Joshua’s 5th startup endeavor, and has been a savant on the creative use of data and performance marketing methods to unlock and scale business models. Prior to Perigon, Joshua co-founded the insurance comparison site, The Zebra. Joshua teamed up with Emmy-winning innovator Josh Rickel to build Perigon. Josh brings a wide range of startup experience across entertainment, media, SaaS, venture capital, and government. Earlier in his career, Josh led sales and marketing at Mass Relevance through its acquisition by Spredfast, culminating in a successful acquisition by Vista Equity Partners in 2018. Their combined vision and expertise were evident from our very first conversation.
It comes as no surprise that the Perigon team has been able to deliver so much value to dozens of customers, many of them household names, in a short amount of time. Perigon’s customers span a wide range of industries that demonstrate the value and versatility of their technology. One example is in the field of financial intelligence, where Perigon goes beyond traditional market news to provide time series data that can enhance algorithms and financial models. Investors and analysts (in this case, the end users) can track unlimited keywords and companies, monitor brand, market, or industry news, discover buy/sell signals, and analyze the perceived sentiment of a publication to predict the market’s reaction.
Another use case is in risk intelligence. Perigon’s news API allows businesses to track real-time event data that may impact their operations, staff, supply chain, or brand. Perigon’s entity, aspect, and topic extraction tracks relevant mentions across sources that are intelligently classified into real-time risk signals, allowing companies to stay ahead of potential disruptions. Their smart classification system distinguishes between hard news and soft news or opinions, while dynamic geo-location and time series tags pinpoint where and when events occur.
The examples we encountered in customer diligence calls underscore a clear “why now” for Perigon. At its core, AI has fundamentally transformed the way businesses think about utilizing unstructured and structured data to deliver valuable analytics.We believe this trend will continue to accelerate the need for clean, structured data products – whether consumed as a key input in what’s now an exploding number of AI/ML models, or directly by an end user.
From a business perspective, Perigon has been incredibly capital efficient, outpacing inferior products that incumbents have taken years to build. In our diligence process, customers consistently praised Perigon’s superior ability to ingest, de-duplicate, and organize a long tail of data sources in a clean way. With features like story summarization, clustering, categorization, sentiment analysis, and enrichment, Perigon has quickly become a trusted partner for leading companies worldwide.
As the first institutional money in, backing visionary entrepreneurs looking to tackle large underserved markets with distinctive technology, Perigon is middle of the fairway for what constitutes a “LiveOak deal”. Here’s to the beginning of an exciting partnership!