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News calendar    Jul 27, 2016

Edison Partners Leads Investment in Predata

Powers Growth for Predictive Event Intelligence Pioneer

Predata.png

 Powers Growth for Predictive Event Intelligence Pioneer

PRINCETON, NJ, July 27, 2016 – Edison Partners proudly announced leading financing of New York City-based Predata, a pioneer in predictive event intelligence. Chicago Ventures and Conversion Capital also participated in the round. The investment will fuel continued product innovation and go-to-market expansion.

The Predata predictive analytics platform is used by hedge funds, corporate security officers, and government agencies to forecast geopolitical risk throughout the world. Using open-source intelligence (OSINT), the platform enables organizations to collect and visualize tens of thousands of digital conversations from a range of social and collaborative media channels on a daily basis. Regressing this data against historical datasets allows Predata to quantify the probabilistic nature of various destabilizing event types in more than 200 countries.

“Predata is revolutionizing the predictive analytics landscape with its unique use of social conversation data and next generation machine learning that provides much more lead time than other solutions to take action prior to an event occurring,” said Chris Sugden, Managing Partner at Edison Partners. “We applaud the team for what they have accomplished to date and are thrilled to be a part of the next phase of the journey.” With this investment, Chris Sugden joins the company’s board of directors.  

“This milestone highlights Predata’s success and opportunity in leading the predictive intelligence category with a differentiated approach to addressing the assessment of political, financial and market risk,” said James Shinn, CEO at Predata. “Chris and the Edison team bring much more than capital; their deep industry expertise, large network, and operating expertise made them the ideal partner as we drive further into the finance, corporate, and intelligence markets.”

Predata is the tenth investment for Edison’s latest fund, Edison Partners VIII, which closed last month. It is also the firm’s thirty-ninth investment by its Financial Technology practice. Notable exits include Edgetrade (NASDAQ: NITE), FolioDynamix (NASDAQ: ACTA), GAIN Capital (NYSE: GCAP), Liberty Tax (NASDAQ: TAX) and Princeton Financial. Current investments include: BFS Capital, Billtrust, Clearpool Group, Compliance Science, OptionsCity, Scivantage and Trader Tools.

About Predata

Predata is using predictive analytics to build the world’s smartest platform for political, financial and market risk intelligence. Predata’s secure, cloud-based platform enables customers to understand, visualize and anticipate dynamic, real-time shifts in online conversations about topics of interest to them. By focusing on patterns of online behavior on popular social and collaborative media services, Predata is able to capture and express the volatility of discussion online -- a unique approach applicable across a diverse set of topics, languages, interests and user groups. Combined with a proprietary event database, Predata’s volatility signals provide users with early warning for different types of risk event in any given country, operational footprint, or area of interest. For further information, visit www.predata.com

About Edison Partners

For 30 years, Edison Partners has been helping CEOs and their executive teams navigate the entrepreneurial journey and build successful companies. Through the unique combination of expansion capital and the Edison Edge platform, consisting of strategic advisory, the Edison Director Network, and executive education, Edison employs a holistic approach to nurturing invention and creating value for growth stage businesses ($5 to $20 million in revenue) in financial technology, healthcare IT, enterprise IT, and marketing technology industries. Edison investment objectives also include: buyouts, recapitalizations, spinouts and secondary stock purchases.

Edison’s active portfolio has created aggregate market value exceeding $5 billion. Its long-tenured team based in Princeton, NJ manages more than $1 billion in assets throughout the eastern United States.

 

 

 

Chris is Managing Partner and Chairman of the firm's investment committee. He has been on both sides of the table as a successful entrepreneur. His experience includes leading sales, product, finance, business strategy and capital formation.