Insider Brief
- Second Foundation Partners has rebranded as Perscient and raised $4.1 million from clients to scale its AI-powered narrative intelligence platform for business and investment insights.
- The Perscient platform uses Semantic Signatures and large language models to analyze narratives across unstructured data sources like news, transcripts, and social media.
- The company has added five new team members, including industry veterans, to support the growth of its software business and continues to publish through its Epsilon Theory brand.
PRESS RELEASE — Second Foundation Partners, the parent company to iconoclastic financial media brand Epsilon Theory, has announced the successful completion of a $4.1 million B-round of funding entirely from clients. Following this investment, the company will operate as Perscient, sharing the name of its groundbreaking, AI-powered narrative intelligence platform that delivers actionable insights to forward-thinking investors and business leaders.
The Perscient technology represents a natural evolution of the company’s long-time focus on the unraveling of narratives present in news, academic journals, blogs, transcripts, and social media and marks a bold new entry into the business intelligence software market. The Perscient technology – delivered as Storyboards featuring Semantic Signatures – combines human expertise with AI tools to measure, visualize, and analyze the stories driving markets, politics, sports, media and entertainment. By leveraging large language models to process unstructured datasets rapidly, Perscient empowers clients with a clearer view of the past, deeper understanding of the present, and more accurate predictions for the future.
“Our goal has always been to help the world see through stories, but we weren’t going to try to scale it until we were sure we could do it right,” said CEO and Co-Founder Rusty Guinn. “After more than a decade spent researching and building our Semantic Signatures technology, we are ready to deliver a whole new kind of business intelligence – narrative intelligence – to any enterprise that is data rich and insight poor.”
Perscient’s Semantic Signatures technology transforms the meaning of language used to discuss markets, companies, customers, competitors, products, and politics into measurable, actionable data. Unlike simplistic competing tools used to measure sentiment or extract key words from a text, Perscient’s technology delivers a comprehensive measure of the strength of stories. Matched with arresting Storyboard visualizations and data-friendly tools, the platform is well-resourced and is already being deployed to new clients and industries.
In addition to new funding, Perscient has also aggressively expanded its roster of talent and expertise. Five new team members have joined the company since April. Jeremy Radcliffe, previously co-founder and President of Salient Partners, a $20 billion wealth and investment practice in Houston prior to its sale, has joined Perscient as its Chief Product Officer. Together with Jessica Rutland, a seasoned business intelligence product management executive, Radcliffe will focus exclusively on the growth of the company’s narrative intelligence software platform. The product will be further aided by the additions of Aleichia Celestina Williams, Niall Ridgley, and Matt Zeigler, each a prolific multi-media content creator with focused expertise in the identification and crafting of narratives in different fields.
Long-time client Rafael Mayer, CEO of Khronos, has seen much of this evolution take place in real-time. “I have always had respect for the insights I get from reading what Ben and Rusty have to say, but to be able to access that insight at scale across a wide range of topics has been a game-changer for us.”
Perscient Co-Founders Ben Hunt and Rusty Guinn and an expanded stable of internal and external contributors will continue publishing articles on Epsilon Theory under Managing Editor Harper Hunt. The same technology underlying the narrative intelligence platform will be directed to drive even more high-quality narrative analysis content through the company’s publishing brands.
“The common thread throughout my professional career, whether in academia, tech or finance, has been a search for the narrative structures that underpin unstructured data and motivate human behavior,” said Perscient co-founder, President and Epsilon Theory creator Ben Hunt. “The technology platform built by our CTO Chris Whatley, Bryan Park, and the rest of the Perscient team represents a major breakthrough, and we are ready to share these powerful tools with the world.”
The Perscient platform is available now, with more information about its capabilities and demos available at perscient.com.
