Irish tech start-up Aylien secures new funding

Irish-based technology firm Aylien has raised €580,000 in its latest funding round, backed by SOSV and Enterprise Ireland.

The money will be used to boost the company’s international reach, add new products, and expand its staff in Dublin from 12 to 20 by the end of the year. The company will also invest in research and development.

The round is being led by SOSV, with Aylien becoming one of Enterprise Ireland’s High Potential Start Up companies.

The company, which is headquartered in Dublin, offers natural language processing and text analysis tools, and already has more than 10,000 customers globally including Sony and the World Economic Forum. The company’s text and image analysis tool can be used to summarise, categorise and extract meaning from large amounts of unstructured data.

Chief executive and founder Parsa Ghaffari said the company was pleased to have the backing of both SOSV and Enterprise Ireland. "We will use these newly raised funds to expand our reach in the market, and to accelerate our growth," he said.

SOSV was one of the company’s original investors, and took part in its $500,000 seed round in 2011. “The more that machines can understand both human natural language and natural unstructured data the more use they can be in distilling critical and valuable information from the digital noise that is our modern lives,” said SOSV partner Bill Liao.

To date, Aylien has raised more than $1.1 million in five funding rounds.