VirtualWorks Group AS raised NOK 95 million ($11 million USD)

VirtualWorks Group AS, based in Oslo, recently raised new funding to support the growth strategy of its business units VirtualWorks AS and ayfie Inc.

Oslo, Norway, June 14, 2017:  VirtualWorks Group, a leading provider of smart search solutions and semantic analysis, has recently raised NOK 95 million ($11 million USD) in new equity.

The equity issue was led by existing investors, new high-quality private investors, Board members and employees. Norwegian investment bank DNB Markets acted as financial advisor and provided great support during the process.

The majority of the funding will be directed towards ayfie, which was successfully launched at LegalTech in New York at the beginning of February 2017. VirtualWorks Group’s established subsidiary, VirtualWorks, is EBITDA and cash flow positive, ramping up profitable business in the foreseeable future.

VirtualWorks has amassed over 500 customers from the direct sales of its search and information retrieval product, ViaWorks, as well as through its strategic pan European partnership with Konica Minolta, selling dokoni FIND, a comprehensive enterprise indexing application. Key customers include Statkraft, Storebrand and ENGIE who all employ ViaWorks to increase efficiency and productivity throughout their respective organizations. Bank MM Warburg and Brabus, both based in Germany, are two customers who opted for dokoni FIND as a solution to aid employees in gaining access to previously unsearchable data across various repositories. With a great return on investment (ROI) and a predictable cost structure, ViaWorks is equally attractive for companies of any size. ViaWorks’ ease of installation and low maintenance requires limited effort to fully utilize the product to its potential.

A portion of the newly raised funds will be directed to VirtualWorks, which will use the funds for marketing activities to promote ViaWorks to new customers and markets.

ayfie’s semantically aware text analytics technology represents a new and forward-looking pillar in VirtualWorks Group’s strategy. It is a unique, proprietary high-performance information extraction platform, which can analyze, automatically structure and understand any text-based content. The technology offers users supreme information retrieval capabilities to sift through vast amounts of both structured and unstructured data more quickly than ever before. Providing products for eDiscovery, media, compliance and search across industries and geographies, ayfie’s lead linguistic teams make sure to constantly keep extraction and recognition services at an unmatched precision level. ayfie has already signed strategic agreements with partners and customers, while simultaneously expanding its product and business development teams to meet market expectations.

A majority of the newly raised funds will be invested in sales and marketing activities as well as further development of the platform to prepare the commercial launch of the product during ILTACON 2017 in Las Vegas.

“The latest funding round will allow both of our business units, VirtualWorks and ayfie, to continue executing on their growth plans and fulfilling its vision of providing smart text understanding technology for a variety of industries. We are very grateful to have amazing investors and an incredibly talented team that believes in the idea of augmenting humans’ ability to consume and understand the semantic content of unstructured data in a fraction of time. VirtualWorks Group currently has no plans to raise additional capital; however, we might seek additional funds if an acquisition or merger opportunity presents itself,” says Erik Baklid, CEO and president of VirtualWorks Group.

About VirtualWorks AS – VirtualWorks (www.virtualworks.com) was founded in 2009 and has grown to become one of the leading search companies offering smart knowledge discovery products and search solutions in the Nordics, Europe, and the United States. VirtualWorks’ proprietary platform has been developed to include innovative technologies from the fields of big data discovery, insight, advanced linguistic analysis and content analytics. VirtualWorks’ knowledge, experience and technology provides a solid foundation for global digital workplaces in companies of every industry.

About ayfie Inc. – ayfie (www.ayfie.com) provides products for eDiscovery, media, compliance and search across industries and geographies. The language processing technologies developed by ayfie are based on more than 30 years of research in linguistics, computational linguistics and computer science at a number of universities, in particular the University of Munich and the University of Paris. Using these technologies, ayfie has created a unique text analytics platform, performing forensics, research, and ultimately automated prediction based on unstructured text data.