Hello Soda is a Manchester-based international big data and text analytics company that provides a global text and big data analytics platform to businesses. Its core products target ID verification, risk and personalisation verticals with advanced text analytics software solutions. The company serves customers across six continents, chiefly in the UK, USA, Mexico, Australia, Spain and South Africa, and maintains offices in the US and Thailand. Led by CEO James Blake, Hello Soda intends to use new funding to continue its global growth plans and raise the profile of its tech offerings. The company recently raised £5.5m in equity and debt funding and secured an additional £1.5m venture debt facility to support expansion and marketing of its technology. HelloSoda uses Bayesian Belief Network principles to generate scores predicting creditworthiness and fraud risk from structured inputs (e.g., number of Facebook friends) and unstructured text such as blog posts and tweets. The platform also analyses interactions between people in social networks and claims capability to identify fraudulent social media accounts. HelloSoda sells its product into existing lenders, insurers, gaming companies and HR/recruitment departments rather than acting as a lender itself. The company was founded by Paul Shepherd and James Blake (ex-head of Global Sales at Call Credit) and is based in Manchester. Its team includes engineers hired from Skype and LShift and data scientists from various universities. The startup has received undisclosed backing from unnamed Tallinn, Estonia–based investors; no revenue, valuation or user metrics are disclosed in the article.

Total raised

$9M

Funding rounds

3

Latest round

Debt Financing

Latest activity

Nov 2017