Romanian startup Veridion announces USD 6 mln financing to expand to US, further develop its AI technology

Romanian startup Veridion (formerly known as Soleadify) announced on February 21 a USD 6 million late seed round to expand to the US and further develop its AI technology. It raised the seed round from LAUNCHub Ventures, OTB Ventures, Underline Ventures, and existing investors Day One Capital and GapMinder Venture Partners.

The Romanian startup said that it plans to continue building its US footprint by opening a New York office in 2023. It also explained that the name change “is intended to highlight the company’s unique standing in the market, their commitment to being a single source of truth and reflect the company’s ambitious plans for future growth.”

Veridion is a new-age data vendor that specializes in firmographic data. It maintains a weekly-updated database of over 80 million company profiles. Its data covers every aspect of a business, from identification, locations and classification to product offerings, ESG topics and more.

Veridion uses the power of AI “to revolutionize big data and to comprehend billions of webpages every week in order to build and maintain a highly accurate, global scale, near real-time, single-source-of-truth database of company data made available through a Complex Search API and a Matching & Enriching API.” According to the press release, it is one of the first companies to deploy AI at this scale for data acquisition, which sets it apart from the traditional firmographic data players that buy data from government registries as well as simple web-scraping alternative data providers.

Firmographic data is information that can be used to categorize organizations by a host of information such as business activity, products or services offered, location, employees, industry, technology offered, and so on.

“We believe that the next generation of business decision engines, regardless of industry or vertical, will require a completely new format of data. Predictive models will rely on AI more than human intuition and be capable of exponentially processing more data as their core resource. For this, the data needs to be fresh, granular, easy to work with, and integratable across a wide array of processes. This has been our focus from the beginning, and with this round, we’ll be able to double down on our approach,” said Florin Tufan, founder and CEO of Veridion.

The firmographic data market in which Veridion operates is also known as the business information market and was valued at USD 211 billion in 2022 and is projected to grow towards USD 291 billion by 2027, with new technologies like AI representing a game-changer for big data. According to Gartner’s Data Quality Market Survey, quoted by Veridion, the average financial impact of bad data on organizations in 2022 was estimated to be around USD 12.9 million per year.