Seeking to untangle the mess of documents and data that companies hold onto and wade through, Seattle startup Aerial raised $2 million for its AI-powered answer to unstructured business data analysis.
The pre-seed funding round announced Monday was led by Seattle-area venture capital firm Fuse, with participation from Pack Ventures. Previous investors included Madrona Venture Group’s Pioneer Fund.
Aerial plans to use the fresh cash to accelerate its artificial intelligence solutions. Leveraging machine learning algorithms, natural language processing, and deep learning techniques, the startup says it can extract, organize, and cross-reference unstructured data housed in “document graveyards” automatically, without input from a company or its legal team.
“What we want to do is help companies utilize the business data that they compile over time,” Aerial co-founder and CEO Doug Logan said. “We really like to think of ourselves as a QuickBooks for a bunch of the legal documents that you have,” he added, referencing Intuit’s longtime accounting software.
Aerial’s software aims to replace expensive service providers, such as lawyers, accountants, and bankers who are usually called on by companies to manage, store, and categorize data. The startup calls that process slow and costly, and says it gets in the way of allowing companies to effectively leverage their own data.
Logan spent five years as a corporate lawyer at Seattle law firm K&L Gates, where he witnessed the flow of information between companies, legal teams, finance teams, potential investors, buyers and so on.
He launched Aerial three years ago, and co-founder/CTO Michael Li joined in January 2022. A data science expert with a PhD in computational and applied mathematics from Princeton University, Li is based in Washington, D.C., and previously founded the Princeton Quant Trading Conference and The Data Incubator.
Aerial employs six people and is pre-revenue, with more than 100 companies signed up and using its product.
