Investigative intelligence platform Siren raises $10 million

Siren, an investigative intelligence solutions provider, today announced that it’s raised $10 million in series A funding led by DVI Equity Partners. Frontline Ventures, Atlantic Bridge, and Enterprise Ireland also participated in the round, which comes after a $4 million seed raise in 2018 and brings the Ireland- and Philadelphia-based company’s total raised to nearly $15 million.

As a part of its investment, DVI managing partner Bob Griffin joined Siren’s board of directors.

“The demand for investigative intelligence and large-scale interconnected data analysis is constantly accelerating,” said CEO John Randles. “Our platform uniquely enables this in real time at a scale that companies and government organizations require. In this sector it is critical to not only raise funds, but also to have the right wealth of experience. For this reason, we’re delighted to have Bob Griffin join the board.”

Siren spun off from a group at the National University of Ireland Galway led by Dr. Giovanni Tummarello, who together with cofounder Dr. Renaud Delbru created a search engine — Sindice — that could index knowledge graphs exceeding 30 billion edges created by crawling webpages with schema. The software-as-a-service solution into which it evolved leverages ontology (i.e., representations of entities existing in a domain) to coordinate intelligence with full text search and knowledge base exploration.

Siren’s Investigate deploys atop structured and unstructured data stores, analyzing database indices and external systems to deliver domain-specific visualizations with relational navigation. And it taps algorithms to spotlight only significant connections in a graph, with support for things like rankings and fuzzy and phonetic search.

Siren ships with components tailor made for scientific data visualization, among them interactive scatterplots, heatmaps, and probability density functions. Its alerting and reporting tools ferry alerts and notifications with logic from queries to complex script processing, while its enterprise controls ensure only privileged users modify processes at the index, record, or field level.

Somewhat uniquely, Siren offers a plugin dubbed Federate for Elasticsearch, an open source search engine developed in Java that provides full-text capabilities with a web interface. Whereas basic Elasticsearch can restrict results by attribute filtering, Federate enables filtering by attributes of relationally connected records on local and remote sources. It can be installed on existing Elasticsearch clusters or Java database connectivity sources, which it virtualizes in the latter case.

Siren’s customers include Capita’s Pay360, Magellan Health, AstraZeneca, BNY Mellon, Masergy, and DXC Technology.

“Siren stands at the forefront of augmented analytics, the new wave of analytics in which AI techniques give analysts unprecedented powers of investigation,” said Tummarello. “In Siren, techniques like knowledge graph/link analysis, entity resolution, search, natural language processing and predictive analytics seamlessly come together in a single UI. Siren is easy to deploy and leverages data directly on backends such as Elasticsearch, relational databases, virtual data warehouses and graph databases.”