AI-Powered Expert Search Engine NewtonX Raises $12 Million

By Dan Anderson ● Jun 24, 2019
  • NewtonX, a real-time expert search engine, announced it closed $12 million in Series A funding led by Two Sigma Ventures

Real-time expert search engine NewtonX announced it closed $12 million in Series A funding led by Two Sigma Ventures. Third Prime Capital and Xfund also joined this round.

This round of funding will support the company’s growth plans and expansion of the organization’s personnel count from 30 to 100 within the next year. And the funding will be utilized for the company’s efforts to increase expert discovery capabilities through technology investments and data acquisition as the company officially launches its external facing platform.

NewtonX was founded by CEO Germain Chastel, COO Sascha Eder, and CTO Anuja Ketan. And the company’s expert knowledge search platform uses a proprietary suite of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic process automation (RPA) technology to dramatically reduce the time and cost of surfacing industry expertise and knowledge.

“When my co-founder, Sascha, and I first conceived of NewtonX, we were working on a highly confidential project that required insight into market expansion opportunities for self-driving cars. We needed several in-person workshops and a 50-expert survey within a one-week deadline, but found that there was no solution on the market to meet this deadline while maintaining the quality of the experts chosen,” said Chastel. “Our company’s growth—from three entrepreneurs working out of a basement to over 30 employees out of Madison Avenue—only reiterates this demand. We are thrilled to continue to grow our expert discovery platform to help reimagine how business is done at some of the largest institutions in the world.”

NewtonX enables it clients like Microsoft, 23andMe, and the majority of the top 10 management consulting firms for leveraging the power of automation to connect with professionals who have subject-matter expertise. And the company has transformed knowledge access for numerous Fortune 100 companies by cutting out the middleman providing streamlined connections to expertise for use cases such as voice of the customer analysis, competitive intelligence, product benchmarking, and due diligence.

“What struck us about NewtonX is that they’re attempting to create a paradigm shift in the B2B expertise market. Incumbent market research firms, consulting firms, and expert networks used to rely on pre-existing pools of expert consultants,” added Two Sigma Ventures partner Dan Abelon. “We believe NewtonX is turning this model on its head by automating custom searches to recruit the best experts in real time for any given client request and, in doing so, is capable of transforming multiple industries.”

Ever since NewtonX was founded in 2017, the company built two core pieces of technology including an expert search engine and an expert conversion engine to transform the process of finding and onboarding high-quality experts.

Now NewtonX is opening this technology up to external use in the form of a client-facing platform with a complete product line that consists of four core offerings including expert surveys (mobile-compatible surveys that deliver hundreds of data points in days), expert consultations (on-demand discussions with C-suite executives and niche subject-matter experts), executive recruiting (targeted recruiting of executives with unique and hard-to-find skillsets), and Search Engine White Labeling (customized search capabilities for enterprise internal use).