NewtonX, The First AI-Powered Expert Search Engine, Closes $12 Million Series A Led By Two Sigma Ventures

By HRTech News Desk On Jun 18, 2019

Company Plans Significant Expansion of Personnel Along With Investment in Technology and Data Acquisition To Empower Expert Discovery

NewtonX, the first real-time expert search engine, announces the closing of a $12 Million Series A funding round led by Two Sigma Ventures, with participation from Third Prime Capital and Xfund. The latest injection of capital will support the company’s growth plans and expansion of the organization’s personnel count from 30 to 100 within the next year. The funding will be instrumental to the company’s efforts to increase expert discovery capabilities through technology investments and data acquisition, as the company officially launches its external facing platform.

NewtonX, the first AI-powered expert search engine, closes a $12M #SeriesA funding round led by Two Sigma Ventures.

Founded by CEO Germain Chastel, COO Sascha Eder and CTO Anuja Ketan, NewtonX’s expert knowledge search platform uses a proprietary suite of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic process automation (RPA) technology to dramatically reduce the time and cost of surfacing industry expertise and knowledge. NewtonX enables clients—including Microsoft, 23andMe, and the majority of the top 10 management consulting firms—to leverage the power of automation to connect with professionals who have subject-matter expertise. The company has transformed knowledge access for numerous Fortune 100 companies by cutting out the middleman, providing streamlined connections to expertise for use cases such as: voice of the customer analysis, competitive intelligence, product benchmarking, and due diligence.

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“When my cofounder, Sascha, and I first conceived of NewtonX, we were working on a highly confidential project that required insight into market expansion opportunities for self-driving cars. We needed several in-person workshops and a 50-expert survey within a one-week deadline, but found that there was no solution on the market to meet this deadline while maintaining the quality of the experts chosen,” says NewtonX CEO Germain Chastel. “Our company’s growth—from three entrepreneurs working out of a basement to over 30 employees out of Madison Avenue—only reiterates this demand. We are thrilled to continue to grow our expert discovery platform to help reimagine how business is done at some of the largest institutions in the world.”

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Since the company’s founding in 2017, NewtonX has built two core pieces of technology—an expert search engine and an expert conversion engine—to transform the process of finding and onboarding high-quality experts. Now, two years later, NewtonX is opening this technology up to external use in the form of a client-facing platform with a complete product line that consists of four core offerings:

Expert Surveys: mobile-compatible surveys that deliver hundreds of data points in days
Expert Consultations: on-demand discussions with C-suite executives and niche subject-matter experts
Executive Recruiting: targeted recruiting of executives with unique, hard-to-find skillsets
Search Engine White Labeling: customized search capabilities for enterprise internal use.

“What struck us about NewtonX is that they’re attempting to create a paradigm shift in the B2B expertise market. Incumbent market research firms, consulting firms, and expert networks used to rely on pre-existing pools of expert consultants,” says Dan Abelon, Partner at Two Sigma Ventures. “We believe NewtonX is turning this model on its head by automating custom searches to recruit the best experts in real time for any given client request and, in doing so, is capable of transforming multiple industries.”

NewtonX has even leveraged its own technology to recruit a talented and diverse team. By using its search engine to proactively reach out to hundreds of people for any given role, NewtonX is able to consider a wide range of diverse candidates who may not otherwise have applied to work at NewtonX, or in tech in general. As a result, NewtonX is proud to have a team of over 50 percent women and, just as importantly, over 50 percent women operating in leadership roles.

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