Zegami, the augmented intelligence company helping businesses unlock their data potential through visual data exploration, has raised £1.25M in equity funding. Its latest round of fund raising was led by RT Capital Management and the Oxford Technology and Innovations EIS Fund, with existing investors Oxford Sciences Innovation plc and Oxford University Innovation also contributing.  The funding will enable Zegami to continue developing its next generation data visualisation platform and raise its profile through marketing and commercial partnerships – in particular with LiveTiles and Microsoft.

Together with previous equity rounds and funding, Zegami is investing £4.0 M into democratising data analysis using machine learning to enable organisations to bring structure to their data, making it immediately comprehensible to the human eye through dynamic interactive visualisation.  At the touch of a button, clients can augment and explore their data – documents, PDF, images, audio, maps and video – and see the results displayed visually on a single screen.

Developed at Oxford University, the Zegami platform takes complicated datasets, often only decipherable with complex models and expensive data scientists, and enables a whole organisation’s workforce to be able to engage with data through visual data exploration. The platform allows users to easily filter, tag and sort data by presenting it in an intuitive, engaging way. Zegami’s analysis of organisations that have used its platform reveals that on average they save two hours per worker, per day when using effective visual search and analysis.   

Spun out from Oxford University in 2016, Zegami spent its early years developing its proposition.  It now has thirty-five clients and has developed several case studies illustrating how its proposition works across all sectors.  These case studies include:

• Helping to predict heart disease using images derived from echo cardiogram data 
• Visualise a collection of wall art, associated market values and dummy stock values
• The effectiveness of social media.  Zegami’s powerful graphing and filtering tools can see what factors affects the reach of social media posts
• To provide a dashboard-based software tool that allows HR professionals to conduct people analytics.

Samuel Conway, Co-Founder and CEO at Zegami, said:

“Over the last few years Zegami has been developing a cutting edge Visual Data Exploration platform to democratise data analytics, enabling people to make sense of the tsunami of data available today.  Our focus is now on the commercialisation of the software, working with commercial partners like LiveTiles and Microsoft to take the product to the world. By democratising data, Zegami will enable people to realise the potential of data for their organisation – whether it be commercial, academic or government”.

The global big data and business analytics market was valued at $169bn in 2018, and it is expected to grow to $274bn by 2022.

Adam Workman, Head of Oxford University Innovation Investments and New Ventures, said:

"Zegami has made excellent progress in developing its visual data exploration platform - a technology which has numerous applications across a wide variety of sectors. As the technology matures, we're incredibly excited to see the next stage of evolution at the company."