Filament secures £2.85m

Filament, a company providing private equity market intelligence, has secured £2.85m in a funding round led by Wealth Club.

Founded in 2016, Filament has built a platform named ‘Syfter’, which deploys natural language processing and machine learning to provide market intelligence and deal opportunities in real time.

According to the company, the platform sits within a GP’s firewall and integrates third party data with the private equity firm’s internal proprietary data. It then uses algorithms to analyse the data and provide tailored investment strategies.

“The Wealth Club investment gives us the clear opportunity to rapidly accelerate growth. We are also excited to be connected to Wealth Club’s sophisticated investors, many of which work within the world of private equity or have close ties to the sector,” said Phil Westcott, CEO and co-founder of Filament. “This in itself presents a great opportunity for building more ambassadors of the brand and greater awareness of what we offer.”

“We were attracted to Filament because of the many proof points within the business: the team has a track record of growing platform revenues, over 120% growth in 2022 alone, and we were impressed by the feedback from customers about Syfter demonstrating great product market fit,” commented Gayle Bowen, finance director and head of direct company investments at Wealth Club. “Increasingly, private equity firms need to showcase their data technology abilities during fundraising, as a means of grabbing the attention of potential large investors. The ability to scale research and monitoring by investing in data is a valuable differentiator and helps PE firms secure the best deals in an increasingly competitive market.”

Charles-Hubert Le Baron, partner at Astorg, added: “There is more and more value to be obtained from the consolidation and matching of external and internal sources of data. Additionally, there is an increasing need to use proprietary sourcing strategies to differentiate ourselves. Filament Syfter helps us to achieve both goals and is the best/only proposition in the market enabling that.”