China smart text processing start-up raises $92m
Data Grand, a China-based specialist in text recognition and processing robotics, has raised CNY 580m （USD 92m）in Series C round featuring China Merchants Securities, CITIC Securities, GF Securities, and China Securities.
Other investors include Legend Star, Xiang He Capital, Sunshine Insurance Group, Hundreds Capital, Shenzhen Capital Group, Advantech Capital, and Zhonglin Capital.
The company raised CNY 270m in an extended Series B round led by Shenzhen Venture Capital in 2020, according to AVCJ Research. SAIF Partners, Mount Morning Capital, and Z Capital also took part. This followed a CNY 160m Series B in 2018 led by China Broadband Capital's Chenshan Asset Management and featuring Oriza PE Fund Management, Legend Star, and Eastern Bell Venture Capital.
Founded in 2015, Data Grand claims to have built the first domestic technology platform for intelligent processing of complex texts. Through the combination of natural language processing (NLP) and robotic process automation (RPA), computers have replaced humans in reading, comprehension, and writing.
Computers are programmed to process and analyze large amounts of natural language data, which is used in translation and even in writing based on the source material. RPA handles simple repetitive work such as financial statement verification; NLP comes to the fore in more complex tasks such as prospectus review and official document writing.
Data Grand's vision for the future is that people will be mainly responsible for higher-level decision-making work, while digital employees take over low-level tasks. For example, when producing a report, the person puts together a summary and then digital staff automatically generate the content.
The company has served customers across financial services, media, logistics, energy, retail, and government. It is looking to deepen its exposure to education, healthcare, and manufacturing. The Series C proceeds will support R&D in NLP, RPA and optical character recognition (OCR) as well as being used to develop downstream industry applications.
Yunwen Chen, Data Grand's founder and CEO, previously served as chief data officer at Cloundary Corporation, one of China's largest online community-driven literary platforms. Before that, he worked at Baidu and Tencent Holdings as a data algorithm engineer.
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