There is a lot of buzz about genetic AI and the impact it can have on business. But look beyond the hype and high-profile deals like the one between OpenAI and PwC last week, and you’ll see that the world has already been using customer-facing, code-free AI tools for years to extract information and faster work.
Now, one of the first engines in this space – Sirion Labscontract specialist — is acquiring another pioneer of business artificial intelligence, Eigen Technologieswhich focuses on analyzing and extracting information and data from documents in industries such as insurance, finance and legal.
The deal highlights not only the opportunity around growing demand for artificial intelligence in the B2B market, but also a broader trend in business IT. Currently, companies are opting for simpler, single-point solutions over multi-point solutions for their IT needs, leading to consolidation among those who build the latter.
Eigen and Sirion aren’t disclosing the financial terms of the deal, but we have some context that tells part of the story.
London-based Eigen is led and co-founded by Dr. Lewis Liu, an Oxford PhD who studied both art and physics. While still a student, Liu invented a new X-ray laser, and some of that math was re-applied to the algorithms Eigen built to extract and understand natural language.
You could describe what Eigen has been doing for years as genetic artificial intelligence, although that’s not the term the company uses. The startup’s no-code tools summarize and extract meaning from large and often unstructured and arcane documents, and Eigen built its own dataset and intelligence engine to support them. Its product is aimed at non-technical users — no data scientists are needed to implement and use it — and typical use cases might be basic search, information, summaries and for compliance purposes.
Eigen has raised just over $80 million to date, and its last publicly known valuation is from 2019, when it raised $37 million at a price of about $170 million. Its investors included Goldman Sachs (strategic backer) and Dawn Capital.
Liu said that before this deal, Eigen had “several offers on the table, including term sheets to continue financing the business.” This could mean that Eigen was under some pressure: He could be nearing the end of his runway and had to make a choice. But with a pretty impressive client book (he works with many big banks and corporate names), he had other acquisition offers on the table, as well as financing offers.
However, it’s a tough market for startups, so funding terms may seem tougher right now even for AI startups. Sirion seemingly came out as the best of the bunch.
Liu said the companies were already working together on business deals because of the way businesses buy IT, and the two seemed to have a “common vision.” Liu will become the company’s head of AI and lead a new hub in London.
For its part, Sirion was founded in India and focuses on contracts, specifically the application of artificial intelligence to contract lifecycle management. Its tools are also GenAI-ish: You can use conversational queries to search and extract information, similar to Eigen. At the same time, it also provides artificial intelligence to analyze contracts and ensure that users are clear with the terms, calculate the total value of the contract and identify any gaps. It currently builds adaptations and “small language models” and also integrates with those building larger LLM core models to power its tools.
Sirion’s latest round, a Series D, was originally $85 million, but then closed at $110 million. Its backers include Peak XV (formerly Sequoia India) and Tiger Global.
TechCrunch confirmed that Sirion is now valued at around $1 billion, an amount Sirion had not previously disclosed, and much of that Series D is still in the bank. The company says it works with more than 250 large enterprises and manages more than 7 million contracts worth $800 billion.
Sirion is not yet profitable and has one to two runway years left, depending on how exuberant and acquired it feels. Acquisitions is on the table, in any case. The main idea, CEO and founder Ajay Agrawal said in an interview, is that it’s looking for additions “under the technology” rather than customer aggregation.
“I think the landscape over the next 18 to 24 months is going to be in a consolidation mindset [in our space]and frankly, there are so many lateral areas for artificial intelligence… We will talk,” he said.
On the other hand, there will be M&A upstream in this space as well. A potential buyer might be one of the larger turntable systems. SAP works with Icertis, Salesforce with Ironclad and Oracle with Sirion. There will be more alliances like these, and some could eventually lead to mergers and acquisitions as part of this broader consolidation trend. Watch this space.
