Dear , 

TheySay Overview:

• University of Oxford spin-out developing the best available tool that most closely emulates a human’s understanding of sentiment expressed in text
• Addressing a large and rapidly growing market for analysis of unstructured “big data”
• Products now market-ready; encouraging commercial traction already achieved

Opportunity

There is expected to be a 44x growth in the “Information Universe” over the next eight years (IDC, The 2011 Digital Universe Study). 80% of this data will be in an unstructured form and will need advanced tools to enable machine understanding. McKinsey & Co. have identified the analysis and interpretation of unstructured data as a “key basis of competition and growth” for companies. 

The market for so-called “text analytics” tools that uncover business value in “unstructured” text is now expanding at a compound annual growth rate of 25%, and is currently estimated to be worth $2.0bn (Source: Text/Content Analytics 2011 Report, Seth Grimes). Growth is being driven by increasing customer awareness of the hidden business value that resides in unstructured social, online, and enterprise data sources, but existing tools are not proving adequate to meet customer requirements.

TheySay Value Proposition

The Oxford academics who invented the TheySay software are linguists by background, which has led them to take a completely new approach to text analytics. TheySay’s technology is based on a deep understanding of language, its structure, patterns and nuances that form human communication. This enables sophisticated understand and analysis of large volumes of text in real time to generate insight including sentiment (positive, neutral, negative), entities (people, places, organisations), emotions, gender, intent and speculation.
The quantifiable benefits vary by customer profile, but can broadly be separately into two categories:
1.Gauging public opinion within a large sample-set (e.g. published tweets, blogs etc.) to tailor strategy and yield increased income or campaign success.
2.Reducing the time spent by human resource on processing large volumes of unstructured information.

TheySay’s core technology is a hybrid engine consisting of highly sophisticated linguistic algorithms, combined with machine learning technology. The company owns a patent over its core technology and has a large body of proprietary linguistic information that would be very difficult for a competitor to replicate.

Customers

TheySay currently has over 20 customers at various stages of engagement, from proof-of-concept to early growth, including a commercial arrangement with KPMG. The company is currently targeting three customer segments:
1.Systems Integrators, Consultants and Developers
2.Marketing service providers
3.Hedge funds, fund managers and traders

The Team

Steve Perry, Chairman, is the Chief Commercial Officer of Visa Europe, responsible for delivering Visa’s business plans and strategies in 37 markets. He is a Director of several Visa National Boards and has been a member of the Visa Europe Executive Management Committee since 1999. 

David Morgan, CEO, was the founder of Invu Plc, a company that he grew from idea to a multi-million pound flotation the AIM market, where he led the company as Chief Executive. He has over eighteen years’ experience in CEO level positions in the IT industry, and twenty four years’ experience of senior commercial management positions within large blue chip organisations.

Professor Stephen Pulman, Founder and CSO, is Professor of Computational Linguistics at Oxford University’s Department of Computer Science, a Professorial Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford, and a Fellow of the British Academy. 

Dr Karo Moilanen, Founder and CTO, has over a decade of experience in Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing (NLP) as a linguist, computational linguist, NLP architect, and NLP consultant.

Investment Opportunity

The TheySay technology targets a vibrant and growing application area where large incumbents are aggressively competing for advantage. TheySay has the opportunity to target a relatively near-term exit in the form of a trade sale, once the technology has been further validated in the commercial domain. 

There have been several recent benchmark acquisitions that indicate the validity of this objective, including Language Weaver’s acquisition by SDL in 2010 for $42.5m, and NStein’s acquisition by OpenText for $34.0m in 2010. Both Language Weaver and NStein are thought to have been acquired for their core technology and neither had yet reached profitability by the time of acquisition.

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