Communications surveillance firm VoxSmart has closed an £18.2 million round of financing.
Amid the shift to working from home during a year of COVID-19 lockdowns, the firm’s tools enable businesses to supervise communication conducted on a range of different voice and digital platforms for risk and compliance purposes.
Demand for cloud-based surveillance technology has grown significantly, with ‘work from anywhere’ becoming standard practice for many firms as they adjust to the post-pandemic economy.
VoxSmart says its expertise in unstructured data processing and indexing allows clients to ensure best practice and accountability of their employee communications in the event of audit, dispute or misconduct.
It first introduced compliant WhatsApp surveillance to the market in 2016 and its technology now captures three messages a second for Tier 1 financial institutions across capital markets, commodity trading and the broker-dealer market.
The lead investor in this investment round is Toscafund Asset Management LLP, VoxSmart says, building on strong support from UK Investment Manager Deepbridge Capital.
It is one of the largest fundraises conducted for the RegTech and compliance sector.
“As market practitioners we have always been acutely aware of market developments and working with market participants to shape our product development and innovation,” said CEO Oliver Blower.
“As such it was important we found a partner who shared our vision and mission within financial services.
“We believe that Toscafund’s global expertise and impressive market connectivity will be of tremendous benefit to VoxSmart in our next stage of growth.”
The investment will fund further expansion and growth particularly into North America and the emerging markets as well as product development in key areas such as instant message capture on emerging channels such as Telegram and Signal as well as enhanced employee risk and productivity analysis.
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George Koulouris, Partner at Toscafund, said: “With this investment, Toscafund has assembled an extremely attractive portfolio of fast-growing businesses that are all contributing their technological skills to the digitization and evolution that is currently taking place in the financial services sector.
“The opportunities to invest in this fundamental industry shift are hugely attractive for those with sufficient experience to recognise the genuine leaders in the space. We look forward to working with Oliver and his team.”
Ian Warwick, Managing Partner at Deepbridge Capital, added: “We have been working with VoxSmart since 2017, via our EIS fund, and are immensely proud of what the team have built.
“VoxSmart is exactly the type of business the Enterprise Investment Scheme is designed to support, being a growth-focused unique technology with global reach. We look forward to working with Toscafund to help the business continue to grow.”
RegTech