Open clouds vs the big three

Yes, the major public clouds offer a lot. But what you may not know are the limitations, and how open clouds make the difference.

Sentieo, a financial and corporate research platform provider, today announced it has raised $20 million in a series B round led by Ten Coves Capital. Sentieo says it will use the funds to expand its market reach as it grows its workforce.

Investors and corporations were already looking for opportunities to gain a competitive edge when the pandemic hit. By 2025, more than 75% of venture capital and early-stage investor executive reviews will be informed by AI and data analytics, according to a Gartner whitepaper. But as remote work became the norm last year, standalone investment research solutions hindered analysts’ ability to work collaboratively.

Sentieo aims to solve this with a dashboard that brings various financial research tools onto a single, AI-supported platform. A financial and corporate research platform for executives, investment analysts, and researchers, Sentieo provides a cloud-based workflow for financial document search, market and alternative data, modeling, and analytics, supported by a holistic research management system.

Sentieo’s AI-driven document search component can sift through millions of documents by applying natural language processing and linguistic algorithms. Meanwhile, the company’s integrated equity data terminal offers historical financial and consensus data, as well as modeling tools, mergers and acquisitions data, stock pricing, charts, public and private comparables, filings, transcripts, news, and profiles for over 980,000 private companies.

Sentieo also leverages AI for automated document summarization, categorization, and sentiment analysis and to extract KPIs and create models from filings, according to CEO David Lichtblau. “With the incredible adoption of the Sentieo platform, it is clear we are experiencing a massive shift in how financial and corporate research is executed,” Lichtblau said in a press release. “We see a huge opportunity to replace hard-to-use and expensive point solutions that slow down the journey to uncover competitive insights.”

AI-powered financial research

As the Gartner report points out, current technology is capable of providing insights into customer desires and predicting future behavior. Unique profiles can be built with little to no human input and further developed via natural language processing AI that can determine qualities about a person from real-time or audio recordings. While this technology is now used primarily for marketing and sales purposes, by 2025 investment organizations will be leveraging it to determine which leadership teams are most likely to succeed.

One venture capital firm — San Francisco, California-based Signalfire — is already using a proprietary platform called Beacon to track the performance of more than 6 million companies. At a cost of over $10 million per year, the platform draws on 10 million data sources, including academic publications, patent registries, open source contributions, regulatory filings, company webpages, sales data, social networks, and even raw credit card data. Companies that are outperforming are flagged up on a dashboard, ostensibly allowing Signalfire to see deals before traditional venture firms do.

Sentieo claims to have had a banner year, racking up “record” revenue in 2020. The company says more than 1,000 customers — including 800 institutional investment firms and Fortune 500 corporations — now use its platform, among them Schroders, Magellan Asset Management, and Roivant Sciences.

Sentieo’s latest funding round had participation from existing investors Centana Growth Partners and Studio Management. It brings the company’s total raised to date to $62 million.

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This article is part of a Gaming Insights series paid for by Facebook.

We recently spoke with Katerina Dudinskaya, VP of Performance Marketing at Gismart, to discuss how the award-winning European publisher is adapting its approach to face new challenges brought about by upcoming iOS 14 changes, and how the team is closing the gap between acquisition and monetization with campaign-level Return On Ad Spend (ROAS).

Facebook: Let’s start off with a macro view of the industry: The pandemic is in full swing, and iOS 14 changes are coming up. How are these massive shifts impacting your business?

Dudinskaya: The pandemic has driven more traffic to almost all of our entertainment products and much of the 2020 uplift has continued through 2021, although we are seeing more competition.

And IDFA deprecation will force us to adapt our approach to marketing and business. For us, the best strategy is just to accept this new reality and try to be creative about how to adapt.

Facebook: As limitations on targeting are becoming top-of-mind for publishers and developers, we’re seeing an evolution in the ads ecosystem. Can you talk about some of the new challenges you’re facing this year?

Dudinskaya: At a high-level, our current challenges are firstly, how to deliver personalized ads and reach our most valuable customers and, secondly, how to provide our monetization partners with reliable user data to predict user-level value more accurately. Latency data and fraudulent data can affect our predictions, and using incorrect data can lead us to the wrong decisions.

We’re also developing updates for our user acquisition structure, analytics, and creative production to help us deal with these challenges.

Facebook: Let’s dive into what it means to build resilience in 2021. What approach are you taking when it comes to app monetization? 

Dudinskaya: Like most other publishers, we will be using a combination of SKAdNetwork and our own analytics systems to track all possible marketing funnel events (downloads, click-throughs, etc). This data will become the base for the decisions and predictions we make.

We’re also working more closely with all our partners: publishers, traffic vendors, and monetization networks. In this new reality, more than ever, you need to work as a team.

Facebook: User acquisition has been a key challenge for publishers and developers. How will you ensure that Gismart will continue to reach and acquire high-value users?

Dudinskaya: We are using all open solutions that are currently available, including AppsFlyer’s proprietary user attribution solution and Unity’s machine learning solution. We also work closely with Facebook Audience Network and Facebook Instant Games teams who help us with user acquisition and monetization. We also continuously improve non-technical ways of personalization, such as growth activities on landing pages, creative production, and UA channel diversification.

Facebook: Many publishers are concerned with revenue loss and the impact of ad targeting limitations and fluctuating CPMs. How do you plan to sustain revenue in this environment? 

Dudinskaya: We plan to apply a holistic approach, working on UA strategies and targeting creative production. We also use some CPM/bidding add-ons produced internally to be able to perform fast testing and to get a snapshot of user funnel metrics from the first impression to the deepest product metric. For games, this could be clickthrough rate, cost per install, cost per app event/acquisition, or average revenue per user.

Facebook: How are you currently measuring return on ad spend (ROAS) at a campaign level? How do you maintain oversight of what’s working on which channels?

Dudinskaya: Facebook Audience Network’s new campaign-level IAA ROAS has helped us to better understand our ROAS, offering accurate insights to make more profitable decisions.

It enables us to acquire quality users, understand the ideal user experience, and ensure long-term engagement and revenue. The synergy of data we receive from different analytics systems, mediation, and other tools give us deeper insights into the channel performance. The more data we can bring into day-to-day operations, the better results we see in our marketing channels.

Facebook: What advice would you share with other publishers and developers who are also preparing to face the headwinds of the upcoming industry changes?

Dudinskaya: It’s worth noting that each advertising platform is quite unique; some creative approaches that work well on one platform, might not perform that well on another. So publishers need to have individual marketing strategies for each platform, taking into consideration their audience and content consumption habits, and the platforms’ technical specifics.

Also, we’re always open to new solutions and we are constantly testing new Facebook features and tools available in an alpha/beta version. Testing new solutions is not only a great way to adapt your marketing strategy but also helps to identify errors and gaps in your current solution set.

Anastasia Petrova is Strategic Partner Manager at Facebook Audience Network.

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