Polecat secures €850,000 investment from AIB Seed Capital Fund, private investors and Enterprise Ireland
Polecat is a software and services company that transforms digital content into strategic insights for executive level decision-making. Polecat’s software platform, called MeaningMineTM, is the world’s first Virtual Analyst software solution that joins advanced search, text analytics and learning-based algorithms with innovative visualizations to deliver real time insights into any topic.
Dublin, London and San Francisco based company Polecat has completed a funding round of €850,000 to accelerate the expansion of its operations.
The funding has been secured from three co-investors, namely The AIB Seed Capital Fund (co-managed by Enterprise Equity), Enterprise Ireland and existing private investors.
Having been declared “Best Emerging Technology Company” by Larry Ellison (CEO, Oracle Corp) in 2009, Polecat is now a fast growing company, currently with 22 full time employees, based in Ireland, the UK, the USA and the Netherlands. Polecat counts as customers the world’s largest companies, government organizations and consulting firms, including Shell, BP, HSBC, Silicon Valley Bank, Sony, Microsoft, Ernst & Young, McKinsey and EU, UK & Irish Government. The company already has significant revenues and is profitable.
MeaningMine is most easily described as a flexible enterprise search and business intelligence platform, capable of mining through the mountains of online and social media data to generate meaningful and relevant strategic insights into virtually any question. Given MeaningMine can demonstrably save analysts more than 50% of the time they spend finding and analysing relevant information, the company’s product is uniquely positioned to meet the needs of a very large ($23bn) addressable global market. Recent customer wins with BP, Ernst & Young and McKinsey bear testament to the product’s power and capability.
Founders James Lawn and Bronwyn Kunhardt established the business in 2008 and are both former executive board members of Microsoft UK.
As well as accelerating sales of its virtual analyst software platform in the UK and Europe, this significant investment will allow Polecat to expand its global presence. The investment is expected to lead to the creation of 30 jobs in Ireland over the next three years.
James Lawn, CEO of Polecat, said: “This latest investment is a vote of confidence in Polecat’sbusiness strategy and technology development. The AIB Seed Capital Fund (co-managed by Enterprise Equity) and Enterprise Ireland are welcome additions to our existing investment partners. Without our investors’ support, MeaningMine would not be the phenomenal success it is today. Over the next year, we look forward to continued rapid European growth and expansion into the North American market.”
Tom Shinkwin, a Partner in Enterprise Equity Venture Capital, said: “We are delighted to be supporting this very able team who have deep domain knowledge and strong operating experience in overseas markets. We expect the business to add several more prestigious clients, as well as additional skilled jobs in the coming years.”
Enterprise Equity Venture Capital jointly manages the AIB Seed Capital Fund of €53 million. This fund was established in 2007 and invests amounts of up to €1.5 million in high growth start-up and early stage companies in Ireland. It is focused on investing in the technology, multimedia, wireless and medical device sectors. The Fund’s limited partners are AIB Bank and Enterprise Ireland.
For more information about MeaningMine, please visit www.polecat.co or contact:
John Peavoy
Polecat
Tel: +353 (0)1 672 5847
Mob: +353 (0)86 8092930
We’re looking to hire 2 new people as we’re getting bigger. See links below for job descriptions and contact details.
See the attached document to view report on the analysis carried out in the Tiddlywiki community
User-Type Analysis of Tiddlywiki Wikigroup Community
The American television show Mythbusters, which airs on the Discovery Channel, features a five member team who put scientific, cultural, and historical ‘myths’ to the test (in amusing ways). Since it began airing in 2003, Mythbusters has been a hit with viewers, most recently helping the Discovery Channel achieve its best Q2 ratings on record with male viewers age 25 to 54.
Our American Polecats are all fans of the show, so we leveraged MeaningMine to see what conversation activity surrounded it. MeaningMine collected and analyzed nearly 3,500 highly relevant online and social media postings from 4 April (just before the new season started) to 29 June (the last show of the new season), and surprisingly found conversation activity citing the Mythbusters tended to skew unhealthy.
Upon closer inspection, we discovered when people write about Mythbusters, they reference the show in a much broader context and not just the author’s thoughts on the show itself.
For example, the most frequently cited posting mentions the Discovery Channel’s collaboration with the White House on 12-April. Another top posting mentioned Mythbusters co-host Kari Byron appearing at a student robotics competition at Walt Disney World. Both of these topics MeaningMine assessed as healthy; the “unhealthy” citations stemmed from authors leveraging the show’s conclusions to prove a point against a broader unhealthy topic. For example, MeaningMine found authors who were writing about the dangers of driving while talking on your cell phone cited a recent Mythbusters experiment that demonstrated the hosts’ driving skills were equally impaired when they were talking on the phone as when driving drunk. While the posting and topic were unhealthy (for a number of reasons), it is an indication the show is being referenced as an educational tool in a broader cultural context.
MeaningMine also found a relationship between Mythbusters-related conversation activity and viewership. We compared our conversation data from MeaningMine against US viewership data
provided by TVByTheNumbers.com, and found a relationship between the number of viewers watching a new episode and conversation force (# of citations). So even though most postings identified by MeaningMine weren’t about people’s like/dislike of the show itself, activity referencing the Mythbusters trended in line with the number of people who watched a new episode.
In addition to analyzing and reporting activity and sentiment trends, MeaningMine can also “read” the content contained within postings to unearth insights into the most frequently discussed topics. We entered the names of each of the five Mythbusters hosts and found the show’s two main hosts – Adam and Jamie – were cited more frequently than the “Build Team” that tackles smaller, side myths (Kari, Tory and Grant).
Similar to the conversation overall, author’s weren’t typically writing about their opinion of a particular Mythbuster, but rather mentioned a host or build team member in a broader context, such as a recent public appearance. MeaningMine delved further into the postings prominently citing one of the show’s “Build Team” members and found Grant Imahara and Kari Byron were mentioned most frequently in postings that discussed science and engineering competitions, while Tory was most frequently mentioned in an appearance at an anvil shooting championship that left five people injured.
Whether it’s energy, politics, or media and entertainment, MeaningMine can analyze and generate insights into practically any topic. We look forward to the next season of Mythbusters and seeing what the world has to say about it.
MeaningMine found and analyzed over 179,000 articles and social media postings published in over 80 countries during a three month period of time covering the oil, gas, coal, nuclear and renewable energy sectors
There was a marked differential in the perception of trust when looking at the overall energy conversation versus postings attributed to just the 230 key players/influencers active in the energy conversation, which included Chevron and the other supermajors. Postings that referenced the key players and influencers were much less healthy than the broader conversation.
We plotted Chevron on our MeaningMine Influence Quadrant, and found the conversation from an overall industry perspective to be in line with Shell, BP and Exxon. However, when drilling specifically into conversation specifying the oil, gas and renewable energy sectors, Chevron-related discussion appeared the most healthy (see chart below)
