(L-R) SESAMm Co-Founders Pierre Rinaldi (COO), Sylvain Forté (CEO ), and Florian Aubry (CTO)
SESAMm, a French AI company empowering users to generate NLP insights from web data on companies, has expanded into Southeast Asia by opening an office in Singapore.
The Singapore business will be led by Thibaut Gunsey, Head of Sales (Asia), who brings nine years of financial-industry experience to the company.
The island nation will be a hub for SESAMm’s regional operations, driving growth through new business development. It is the fintech firm’s first business residency in Southeast Asia, where private equity (PE), public equity, and asset management are ripe for solutions focused on alternative data sources, particularly those sourced with NLP solutions.
The new location will also support its employee growth, with plans to expand the team in the coming months.
“This move represents a significant milestone in our growth strategy,” said SESAMm CEO Sylvain Forté. “Singapore is a key financial centre in the region, and our presence here will allow us to serve our existing clients better and tap into new business opportunities.”
SESAMm was founded in 2014 by Sylvain Forté (Co-Founder and CEO), Pierre Rinaldi (Co-Founder and COO) and Florian Aubry (Co-Founder and CTO).
SESAMm’s off-the-shelf platform TextReveal empowers users to generate NLP insights from web data on “millions of companies in less than a minute”. The firm analyses more than 20 billion documents in real-time to generate insights for controversy detection on investments, clients and suppliers, ESG and positive impact scores, PE due diligence and sourcing, and sentiment analysis on financial assets.
The startup operates in two areas: NLP and Sustainability (ESG) insights. Its vision is to continue expanding in those two areas in high demand in the APAC region. The market needs will help them continue focusing on further developing technologies applying NLP to serve sustainability-related use cases while serving local clients and positively impacting their strategies.
With operations in six countries, the firm claims it tracks over five million public and private firms providing insights in 100+ languages.
“APAC is diverse, so doing business in Japan differs greatly from Australia or Singapore. However, our solutions’ flexibility and relevance have proven helpful for multiple use cases in the region. In particular, we see a lot of interest in ESG controversies for portfolio monitoring and alerting,” said the SESAMm team in an email interview with e27.
“As with most markets, local expertise is critical We have experienced the nuances of each market, and despite the success, we could have in other markets, we remain humble and have hired local talent from the start for all of our offices worldwide. In Japan, we have two employees and have a couple of positions opened for our Singapore office. We see both offices growing over the upcoming years and even opening more offices in the region,” the team added.
“SESAMm’s proven traction in international markets positions it well to enter Asia, and we see a clear strong appetite from financial institutions and corporates to adopt their solution. We look forward to scaling the business across Asia with them,” said Ivan Ong, Principal at AFG Partners.
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