A D.C. tech startup is closing 2021 with a new identity — and millions of dollars in new funding.
Enquire AI, formerly GlobalWonks, said Tuesday it has raised $5.5 million in a Series A round led by Tokyo's Uzabase, with participation from Teneo Ventures of New York, Blu Ventures of Vienna and “prominent industry angel investors,” according to the announcement.
The company — whose artificial intelligence-based online platform gives organizations real-time information (think: data and research relevant to their work) in bite-sized blurbs — counts Fortune 100 companies and financial institutions among its customer base. The startup’s core product, called Network Pulse, arms businesses with expert insights to help inform research and decision-making — fast. And it’s part of Enquire’s larger Pulse Platform, the engine that the AI powers with an algorithm.
With the new financing, Enquire plans to invest in marketing, introduce new partnerships and expand its team. The 25-person company is looking to add at least five more full-time employees for product development, full-stack developer, operations, accounting, business development and sales positions, according to Bilal Baloch, its co-founder and chief operating officer.
The business plans to attend more business development-related road shows, both in-person and virtual, and focus more on marketing and advertising, Baloch said in an email Tuesday. The strategy also includes further developing its proprietary AI tech, and speeding up its content verification system, he said.
Then there’s the rebrand, which comes just a few years after the District business was founded as GlobalWonks. The company believes the new name will more strongly resonate globally, beyond Washington, it said in its announcement. It also aims to better reflects the company’s distribution strategy for its technology, to integrate it into other software-as-a-service platforms, Enquire said.
“Enquire AI is committed to helping companies become knowledge-efficient,” co-founder and CEO Cenk Sidar said in a statement.
The latest round brings Enquire’s lifetime funding to $9 million, the company confirmed Tuesday. That includes $2 million in seed funding, also from Uzabase, in May 2020.
Sidar, who co-founded the company in 2018, previously spent nine years as president of Cidar Global Ventures, also in D.C. He leads the company with co-founders Baloch and Fatih Orhan, also its chief administrative officer.
