On Wednesday morning Signal AI which mitigates risk and strengthens reputation, marked a major milestone by opening trading at the London Stock Exchange, celebrating its $165 million investment from Battery Ventures. For founder David Benigson, who recalls beginning the business in a garage, the moment was both symbolic and energising, signalling the next stage of the company’s global expansion.
There is a special connection between Signal AI and The MBS Group. On top of appointing Archie Norman as Chair of the business, Signal was borne out of the MBS News and played a critical role in Signal’s inception.
We at MBS started our newsletter over 20 years ago thanks to two clients who used to call every Monday and ask me what was happening in the retail market. To prepare for them, I used to ask one of our Researchers to scour the weekend papers for me in preparation. Eventually, I began to send the two clients the ‘clippings’ and then began to add more and more people to the list. Researchers at MBS then took it in turns to ‘clip’ the papers and eventually we were sending it out five days a week – at 2pm as with no technological support it took about 6 hours to produce!
Today the MBS News has turned into a much-loved source of industry news for some of the most senior people in the country at some of the top businesses and institutions – now powered by Signal AI, arriving in your inbox at 9am, six days a week. Talking to David about how it began, he said: “The question we asked was, ‘why isn’t there more available to our clients?’. And we tried to get to the bottom of why this service was so valuable by looking at a way to scale, with additional areas of intelligence that we could use to help companies to make better decisions.”
The first step was interviewing two dozen MBS clients from across the country to understand what information services they had and what they relied on when it came to intelligence. “What we found was pretty old school,” David explained. “Many were ‘clipping’ the newspapers and there were virtually no daily newsletters at the time.” In 2013, when Signal AI began, the digital landscape was in the midst of a dramatic overhaul. “Social media was exploding, the volume and velocity of information was increasing rapidly and the world was clearly becoming more globally interconnected thanks to the likes of social media,” said David.
“What became apparent was that those old school methods for sourcing intelligence were no longer going to be fit for purpose.”
It was from this thinking, that Signal AI was born.
Now its award-winning technology serves some of the largest companies in the world, helping them to get ahead of risks that are coming from outside of their organisations, and managing their reputations better by tracing and measuring that data and information. David tells me: “No one could have predicted that there would have been so many micro and macro issues, from the geopolitical to the macroeconomic and sociopolitical. Businesses have been having a difficult time navigating that complexity, and Signal’s vision has been to redefine how they can use data and strengthen their reputation while navigating risks with more confidence.”
“This is a new category that’s forming, and I really believe that every company of a certain size and scale should now have a Chief Risk Officer to be able to look outside of the business and get ahead of risks and threats.”
Just like it was a decade or so ago when Signal came to be, the digital space is continuing to progress at pace at both market understanding level and in the technology itself. In the early days, there was some cynicism around AI among corporate business leaders, but ChatGPT and generative AI has changed that. “It’s set the world alight,” David tells me. “Generative AI has this human-like capacity to be able to speak and answer questions like a human, and that is almost like magic.” Signal was built on what is known as Discriminative AI, which, contrary to Generative AI, uses existing data to identify and categorise based on learned patterns. This technology is rooted in fact, and works by extracting very precise signals. However, as the landscape continues to evolve, so does Signal.
“We’ve, more recently, been able to combine our award-winning Discriminative AI with the power of Generative AI to produce the summaries and the synthesis to generate insight from those discriminative signals that we extract,” David told me. This has led to the launch of AskAIQ which has been purpose-built for senior leaders to receive actionable insights in real time. Advancements like this are all part of Signal’s continuing journey in creating this new category around risk and reputation intelligence. David explains: “We’ve been evolving our capabilities to be much more predictive and strategic to really help inform decisions at a very senior level. This is a new category that’s forming, and I really believe that every company of a certain size and scale should now have a Chief Risk Officer to be able to look outside of the business and get ahead of risks and threats.”
“It’s set the world alight. Generative AI has this human-like capacity to be able to speak and answer questions like a human, and that is almost like magic.”
The latest funding round represents an opportunity to double down on this vision. Signal already has offices in London, New York, Lisbon and Hong Kong, and the immediate focus will be to expand further in the United States, target larger enterprises and continue to invest in the technology that underpins the platform. The choice of Battery Ventures as a partner is significant, bringing not only financial backing but also deep expertise in scaling technology businesses internationally as Signal AI enters the next phase of its journey.
From a garage in north London to the floor of the London Stock Exchange a decade later, the journey of Signal AI reflects not just the story of one company but the broader transformation of how information is sourced and used in business. What began, in part, as a question about why a newsletter mattered so much to its readers, has become a platform redefining how leaders can understand and harness their external environment. With fresh backing and growing momentum, the next phase of Signal AI’s growth is set to be an exciting one – and to remind them every day of where they began, they will hopefully continue to power the MBS news.
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