Austin-based Perigon has closed on a $5 million seed stage round of financing led by LiveOak Venture Partners.
Josh Rickel, co-founder, said the company plans to use the money to hire key employees and further develop its technology.
In 2022, Rickel founded Perigon with Joshua Dziabiak, a serial entrepreneur who previously co-founded The Zebra in Austin. They wanted to make sense of public web data and news information. They named the company Perigon, a math term that means a 360-degree view, to make companies aware of what’s happening around them, Rickel said. They call it contextual intelligence or the ability to adapt to new information and situations.
Rickel said Perigon helps businesses and government agencies cut through the Internet’s noise, understand real-time data, and make better decisions. Perigon’s platform seeks to eliminate misinformation and synthetic content and provide companies with helpful information. The company scrapes data from more than 130,000 sources on the web and organizes it to answer queries.
“Perigon is committed to turning the chaos of the web into an organized system, making it possible for AI to understand and interpret the world’s events as they happen,” Dziabiak said in a news release. “It’s all designed to serve people with more context and diverse perspectives on the key issues that shape our world, in business and life.”
Perigon already has more than 70 customers, including government agencies, financial services companies, startups, and consumer products, Rickel said. According to a news release, environmental agencies have used Perigon’s platform to learn about environmental, health, and security risks. The platform also provides valuable insights to financial institutions and trading platforms looking for real-time data on economic trends.
Rickel said Perigon’s platform harnesses AI to update and make sense of all the data. The data is consistently updated and delivers real-time results.
“We are excited about the market opportunities that arise from unlocking contextual insights from public information at scale for business practitioners and consumers,” said Krishna Srinivasan, founding partner of LiveOak Venture Partners. “In a short period of time and with limited investment, Perigon has leveraged AI and powerful models to deliver value directly to end-users and through APIs by dozens of demanding customers all over the world. We believe that repeat entrepreneurs Joshua Dziabiak and Josh Rickel are the right pair to lead this ambitious endeavor and seize this massive opportunity.”
Perigon has over 20 employees, including a team of engineers in Ukraine. It’s a virtual company with employees worldwide, including Algeria.
