RS21 has pulled in its first bit of venture capital eight years after the Albuquerque data science company first got off the ground.
Thayer Ventures, a San Francisco-based VC firm that invests primarily in lodging, food service and transportation companies, invested $3 million in RS21, the Albuquerque company announced Tuesday. It's RS21's first external funding.
That money is an "accelerant for the company," said Matthew Ennis, Ph.D., RS21's chief product and strategy officer. He added that the investment is the first in a Series A investment round — typically used to scale proven companies — targeting a total of $5 million.
"It will allow us to build out subject matter expertise in the areas where we want to grow," Ennis told Albuquerque Business First. "This also will allow us to take services and deployments that we've done and productize that and take it to customers around the world."
Part of growing that subject matter expertise will come through hiring more people. The company wants to create 30 new jobs over the next two years, and it's currently hiring a second recruiter to help with that hiring process, Ennis said.
He added that much of the company's work will be "the same but expanded." Some of RS21's clients include the University of New Mexico's Comprehensive Cancer Center and the Bernalillo County District Attorney's Office, which RS21 is working with to develop a platform to track crime.
"The simplest way to talk about what we do is that we help organizations solve problems with better information," Charles Rath, RS21's CEO, told Business First.
It does that by taking data from those organizations or from outside sources, applying data science or specific algorithms to transform and analyze that data and then presenting it using different types of visualizations.
For example, one technology RS21 is working on expanding is an artificial intelligence-backed platform to monitor satellite anomalies, called the Space Prognostic AI Custodian Ecosystem — or SPAICE. It uses available satellite data to run an algorithm that can predict when a satellite is about to have a fault.
The company earned a phase three contract with the U.S. Space Force for that tech; Rath said he's "extremely bullish" on its potential.
"We're seeing a ton of demand signals from satellite manufacturers, from numerous federal agencies," Rath said. "We see our SPAICE portfolio growing tremendously over the next few years."
Besides contracts with customers, Ennis said RS21 is also looking to expand through partnerships with universities, government agencies or other companies. New money could help boost those partnership opportunities, too.
"One of the things that's happened in the world is you've got all these organizations that are sitting on data and they've finally realized, 'Wait, there are a lot of how we do things or how we could do things that are locked up within that data'," Ennis said. "They're now starting to tease out those answers and try to find out what they can do moving forward, and that's where RS21 can help."
Ennis was one of two C-suite executives to join RS21 in late April, alongside Dr. Mark Epstein, who took over as its chief medical officer. Missi Rogers is the company's chief operations officer.
Thayer Ventures, the firm that invested in RS21, has received money from New Mexico's State Investment Council, an institutional investment firm that manages billions of dollars in permanent and governmental funds for the state. Those commitments typically come with requirements for VCs to invest a certain amount of money in New Mexico-based companies.
