Eigen Technologies, which provides NLP-driven doc analysis in the legal and financial sectors, has opened an office in the EU, choosing Lisbon in Portugal for its third base. It has also reported a tripling of recurring revenues over the last year.
The company, which has raised $60m to date and is backed by Goldman Sachs, Temasek, Lakestar, and Dawn Capital, already has an office in New York along with its main base in London.
The move into Europe appears to be primarily focused, for now, on building an engineering team there. At present they have about 150 staff globally.
As to why Lisbon, a spokesman for the company said that Portugal has a lot of coding expertise, it gives the multinational company a fixed base inside the EU after BREXIT, and as Lisbon is also in exactly the same timezone as London it makes communications easier.
Artificial Lawyer would add that if you are building out your engineering team, then Lisbon is clearly going to have less costs associated with it than London or New York.
That the company has tripled revenues across what has been a very challenging year because of the pandemic is also noteworthy. Not all doc analysis companies have done so well during this time. For example, Germany’s RFRNZ had to close down after funding dried up during the pandemic, while well-known legal AI pioneer, Kira Systems, underwent a ‘strategic restructure’ that saw more than 20 staff leave the company.
So, what helped Eigen? One factor is that they’ve always been spread across legal, top end financial sector work, and the insurance sector – so they’ve hedged their exposure. And they point out that they have also now moved into wholly new areas such as FMCG, industrials, energy, and healthcare.
Second, the focus on complex financial regulation has proven to be very useful. When LIBOR/IBOR repapering needs came along and really surged over the last 12 months it clearly helped.
Lewis Liu, Co-founder & CEO at Eigen, said: ‘It’s a sign of just how fast we’re growing that we’re now launching our third office and Lisbon is an ideal place for us to expand in Europe. We’re a business based on proprietary AI technology and Lisbon is home to some exceptional technology talent that is key to ensuring our business remains at the forefront of innovation.
‘We have had a fantastic year so far, tripling recurring revenues year-on-year and moving into new sectors. With demand only increasing, it is vital that we continue to scale our team and global presence to match that.’
Out of interest this site took a look at the job description for a new software engineer role in Lisbon to see what Eigen was offering, and also requesting. Here’s part of the info – (some of the more interesting bits are in bold.)
‘Why join Eigen?
- We are building a product on the cutting edge of Natural Language Processing technology
- We have an exceptional Senior Management team with some of the best minds across Sales, Engineering, Science and Product
- We are a highly collaborative, diverse, dynamic and supportive team with a positive culture
- We offer a great office environment, a clear development path, and many tangible benefits including:
- Monthly Hackathons (some themed, some open)
- £1,000 annual training budget
- Flexibility to manage your work and personal commitments
Our Tech Stack (but open to others!)
- Python + Django
- ReactJS + Redux
- Kubernetes
- Machine Learning (ML) & Natural Language Processing (NLP)
What you’ll be doing
- Writing code. Because writing code is cool!
- Researching, googling and StackOverflowing to find the latest software gadgets. We love being bleeding-edge and would be on Python 4 if we could
- Whiteboarding with collaborative people to architect a shiny new feature
- Studying a colleagues’ pull request to make sure our code quality stays awesome
- Pair programming your way through difficult problems because two brains are better than one
—
[ Main pic: Photo of Lisbon by RT. ]
1 Trackback / Pingback
Comments are closed.