Predata, a pioneering provider of predictive event intelligence, today announced it has secured $3.25 million in venture funding. The round was led by Edison Partners with participation from hedge fund manager Kyle Bass, Chicago Ventures, and Conversion Capital. The funding positions Predata for continued product innovation and go-to-market expansion.

Predata's platform is used by hedge funds, corporate security officers, and government agencies to collect and visualize large digital conversations from a range of social and collaborative media. The signals generated from these digital conversations are then used to predict the probability of events occurring within a 1 to 90 day window, including asset price changes, civil society boycotts and protests, labor strikes, electoral results, and national security outcomes.

"The web is dense with hidden information that is harvested by Predata to offer new insights into how key risk events will unfold, whether political campaigns, terrorist attacks, and even monetary policy decisions," said CEOJames Shinn, a Silicon Valley veteran who co-founded software firm Dialogic before joining the Central Intelligence Agency as National Intelligence Officer for East Asia and then serving as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Asia. "With the backing of investors as savvy as Edison Partners, Kyle Bass, Chicago Ventures, and Conversion Capital, we'll keep expanding our engineering and sales teams, as well as the depth of our product offering, as we drive further into the finance, corporate, and federal government markets."

Over the last year, Predata has helped clients anticipate:

• attacks on oil infrastructure in North Africa;
• military provocations by Vladimir Putin's expansionist Russia;
• shifts in public sentiment during the Brexit referendum; and
• large moves in currencies and interest rates by monitoring digital discussions on central banking.

Predata supplies Bloomberg with a daily index of political volatility for 125 countries, which is available on the Bloomberg terminal for trading and asset allocation decisions.

"The internet has become the primary medium of public discourse across the globe," said Andrew Choi, Predata's CTO. "While others have derived value from what people are saying, we have found that there are richer and more nuanced patterns in how they engage with each other. Combined with the application of machine learning to a traditionally thorny and qualitative problem, Predata is bringing truly novel insights and analysis to our users."

"Predata is revolutionizing the predictive analytics landscape with its unique use of social conversation data and next generation machine learning, which provides much more lead time than other solutions to take action prior to an event occurring," said Chris Sugden, managing partner at Edison Partners, who will join Predata's board of directors. "We applaud the team for what they have accomplished and are thrilled to be a part of the next phase of the journey."

Kyle Bass, founder and principal of Hayman Capital Management, said: "Predata has predicted world events with admirable accuracy and foresight, including the Brexit outcome and test launches of missiles in North Korea. The company's intelligence platform will become an integral tool for those working in investment management, political science, national security, and business."

Stuart Larkins, partner at Chicago Ventures, said: "Given the systemic increase in volatility across many political systems, there is an acute need for the new class of analytical tools Predata has built to better evaluate, predict, and trade on or manage geopolitical risk. Chicago Ventures has deep ties to asset managers and corporate partners that demand these tools and will benefit greatly from Predata's capabilities."

Christian Lawless, managing partner at Conversion Capital, said: "In an increasingly volatile global landscape, getting information is no longer enough, it's the ability to predict events and outcomes before they happen that is most critical. Made possible due to new forms of open source intelligence and a void left by traditional forms of research, Predata has become an invaluable tool for any financial services institution or government that requires a lens into the future."

About Predata 

Predata is using predictive analytics to build the world's smartest platform for political, financial, and market risk intelligence. Predata's cloud-based, language-agnostic platform enables customers to understand, visualize, and anticipate dynamic, real-time shifts in online conversations about topics of interest to them. By focusing on patterns of online behavior on popular social and collaborative media services, Predata is able to capture the volatility of digital discussions online, a unique approach applicable across a diverse set of topics, languages, interests, and user groups. Combined with a proprietary event database, Predata's volatility signals provide users with early warning for different types of risk events in any given country, operational footprint, or area of interest. For further information, visit www.predata.com.