Polecat raises €850k to focus on decision analytics business

24 Feb 2012

Tom Shinkwin of Enterprise Equity with James Lawn, co-founder of Polecat, at the closing of the investment round

Polecat, a real-time analytics and decision intelligence company wooed by Enterprise Ireland to locate in Dublin has just raised €850,000. The company, declared by Oracle’s Larry Ellison as “Best Emerging Technology Company”, is bringing big data to the fingertips of business executives.

The company has raised the funding from the AIB Seed Capital Fund co-managed by Enterprise Equity, Enterprise Ireland and existing private investors.

The company, which has offices in Dublin and San Francisco, has grown its workforce from two to eight people in the past few weeks.

Its clients include Shell, BP, HSBC, Silicon Valley Bank, Sony, Microsoft, Ernst & Young, McKinsey, the EU and the UK and Irish governments.

The company’s software platform MeaningMine joins search text analytics and learning-based algorithms with innovative visualisations to deliver real-time insights on any topic.

Polecat’s international sales manager John Peavoy told Siliconrepublic.com that companies can use the technology to mine a variety of sources, including social networks like Twitter and Facebook, to gain a real-time sense of sentiment on issues. like reputation.

“The company was founded in the UK but Enterprise Ireland courted the company three years ago and they moved their headquarters to Dublin and they are to all intents and purposes an Irish company now.

“The technology delivers sophisticated business insight by taking unstructured data from the web – long form and short form – by spidering and tagging information and conversations and provides summaries that give insights, such as reputation analysis.

“For example, if a company wants to figure out what people are saying about a particular issue, brand or subject, MeaningMine will route through blogs and social media, sift through the anecdotal stuff and noise and come up with a real perspective about what people are saying and what the sentiment is.”

The technology visualises this sentiment in the form of graphs and images via the user’s browser.

“This is really about the big data space and making it accessible to ordinary organisations in a way they can understand it, gathering everything such as sentiment by focusing on key people and primary sources. It provides a full forensic examination of the data,” Peavoy said.

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com