Prattle Raises $3.3m Seed Round Led by GCM Grosvenor

CHICAGO, MENLO PARK, Calif. and NEW YORK, Jan. 24, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Prattle, the leading provider of sentiment data solutions for research analysts, traders and other finance professionals, announces a $3.3m seed round of financing led by GCM Grosvenor. New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Correlation Ventures, Plug and Play Ventures and a group of prominent Silicon Valley and Wall Street angel investors also participated in the oversubscribed round. The company will use the capital to continue building out its proprietary sentiment analysis products.

"Our mission is to deliver world-class technology and tools that give finance professionals a comprehensive, unbiased, quantitative measure of market-moving language," said Evan Schnidman, CEO of Prattle. "Grosvenor, NEA and Correlation provide valuable expertise in technology and capital markets finance that will guide our expansion; we are thrilled that they are backing our next phase of growth."

Prattle uses natural language processing, sentiment analysis and machine learning to quantify the relationship between language and the market. Prattle's patent-pending methodology algorithmically generates data that is designed to predict the market impact of central bank and corporate communications. Prattle's solution streamlines the financial research process with data delivered in real time. Finance professionals use Prattle data—accessed through an interactive web portal, email notifications or an API—to anticipate and spot market trends, enabling them to build data-driven trading strategies.

"Text analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence will all become important prerequisites for any thorough, high caliber investment research. Prattle's cutting-edge sentiment analysis has enormous potential to provide this capability to asset managers on a cost effective, outsourced basis," said Michael Sacks, CEO of GCM Grosvenor. "We look forward to working with Prattle as they continue to build their unique technology platform and product offerings in a manner that adds significant value to the marketplace."

"Prattle's technology is fundamentally changing the way traders and analysts think about and consume financial information. Data matters more today than ever before, and being able to effectively quantify market-moving language has tremendous potential not only in financial services, but in a variety of other industries," said Trevor Kienzle, managing director of Correlation Ventures. "We are excited to participate in Prattle's seed financing round and look forward to working closely with the team as they pioneer the next generation of investment research."

About Prattle
Prattle is the leader in quantifying language to generate tradable signals. Prattle provides central bank and corporate sentiment analytics that give clarity to investors struggling with a flood of unstructured data and information. Prattle was founded by experts in textual analytics and economic forecasting and is backed by top-tier Wall Street and Silicon Valley investors including GCM Grosvenor and NEA. Prattle produces its data using Portend, a proprietary data science software platform. For more information, visit www.prattle.co.

About GCM Grosvenor
GCM Grosvenor is a global alternative asset management firm with over $45 billion invested in hedge fund strategies, private equity, infrastructure, real estate and multi-asset class solutions.  GCM Grosvenor has been managing alternative investment portfolios on behalf of clients since 1971. For more information, visit www.gcmlp.com.

About Correlation Ventures
Correlation Ventures, a U.S. venture fund with more than $350 million under management, leverages world-class analytics to offer entrepreneurs and other venture capitalists a dramatically better option when they are seeking additional co-investment capital to complete a financing round. Correlation Ventures invests across all industry segments, U.S. geographies and investment stages—from seed through late stage. Correlation Ventures has offices in Palo Alto, San Diego and New York City. For more information, visit www.correlationvc.com.

SOURCE Prattle

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http://www.prattle.co