Text IQ + Relativity: Helping Large Enterprises Manage the Latent Risk Buried In Their Unstructured Data
Relativity, a global legal and compliance technology company, announced today that it has acquired Text IQ, a Top 100 AI company applying artificial intelligence (AI) to identify sensitive data. When Relativity approached Text IQ about driving a strategic partnership to more closely integrate Text IQ's AI platform with Relativity's platforms for data management and communication surveillance, respectively, we saw this as both a validation to the power of Text IQ's proven technology and incredible team, as well as the recognition that the world's largest enterprises continue to need to utilize AI solutions to tame and mitigate the latent risk buried in the bulk of sensitive, human-generated, unstructured data created on a daily basis.
When we first met with Omar Haroun over coffee in the fall of 2019 (remember those pre-COVID meetings?), we quickly realized we had a strong alignment of our thesis on market needs. Omar, a recovering lawyer, and his co-founder Apoorv Agarwal, a former academic in AI and NLP, were extremely cognizant of the significant challenges large enterprises were facing in managing their unstructured, human-generated data. Gartner analysts have estimated that upward of 80% of enterprise data is unstructured. Each day, 1000s of employees in large enterprises create mountains of unstructured data in various communication media, including emails, messaging apps, documents, presentations and the like. While the modern enterprise is built upon this digital framework of office and productivity tools, the output ends up also containing the most sensitive, and ergo, riskiest data of the given company. Legal, compliance and privacy departments are tasked with essentially looking for the proverbial "needle in the haystack" in their workflows around identifying and managing unstructured data, be it for identifying privileged communications in a lawsuit, properly identifying disclosed personally identifiable information (PII) and personal health information (PHI) in a large-scale data breach, or responding to data subject access requests under the Global Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and similar (and increasingly stringent) data regulatory regimes. The scale of this "data firehose", and the corresponding risk associated with it, is what keeps General Counsels, Chief Privacy Officers and Chief Information Security Officers up at night.
Enter Text IQ: Inspired by Apoorv's original post-doctorate research at Columbia applying AI to the inter-personal relationships of characters in complex Shakespearian novels, the team at Text IQ understands that the keys to any human-generated, unstructured data set are the people involved in the communication and the roles they play. Using unsupervised machine learning, graphical modeling, social network analysis, natural language processing and deep learning, Text IQ's platform effectively applies a layer of "structure" on an enterprise's unstructured data. These entity-specific relationships and communication patterns require very little human-in-the-loop feedback, and significantly outperform the status quo of rules-based classification methods. As a result, Text IQ's Global 2000 customers are using Text IQ's platform to lower the cost and risk of identifying privileged communications in lawsuits that may otherwise have been inadvertently disclosed to a counterparty. They are using it to significantly speed up and increase the accuracy of data breach response workflows, which often have significant timing pressure to react in real-time as the breach is identified and understood. They are using it to identify and manage PII as part of global privacy compliance. In our original customer diligence for our investment, the ROI achieved by Text IQ's customers was fairly incredible, not only on cost and time savings, but more importantly on demonstrable risk reduction.
In parallel, Relativity has built an incredible platform for its customers to manage large scale data sets as part of their e-discovery workflows. Relativity recently announced a strategic growth investment from Silver Lake. By combining forces with Relativity, the Text IQ team will build a seamless integration between their respective products–providing Relativity's 300,000 users managing 145 billion files with access to Text IQ's leading AI capabilities. Meanwhile, Text IQ will continue to offer its core products to privacy, legal and compliance teams.
Intel Capital, alongside our co-investors FirstMark, Floodgate, and Sierra Ventures, is thrilled by this incredible milestone for both Text IQ and Relativity. We couldn't be happier for Apoorv, Omar, and the rest of the Text IQ team, and we look forward to watching the combined Relativity + Text IQ platform aid large enterprises manage their mounds of unstructured data.
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