Venture Capital News: Giant Oak Completes $10M Financing
2018-10-02
ARLINGTON, VA, Giant Oak, a data analytics software company, has secured $10 million in funding.
Giant Oak, a leader in applying artificial intelligence, machine learning and big data analytics for the security needs of government and industry, announced today the appointment of Daniel Moser as its Chief Financial Officer (CFO) and Jim Fowler, Joe Wald, Steve Swoboda and Tom Vander Schaaff as new board members. After a recent $10 million investment from leading growth equity investor Edison Partners, the expanded leadership team brings financial, technological and operational expertise to accommodate rapid growth, especially within the financial, regulatory and public sectors.
Giant Oak is known for its behavioral science-based analytics search platform, Giant Oak Search Technology (GOST®), to screen the open, deep and dark web. GOST allows financial and regulatory institutions to meet compliance requirements spanning KYC, anti-corruption and anti-money laundering (AML) regulations, and to manage and avoid reputational, regulatory, financial and crime risk. National security and law enforcement officials use GOST to identify human trafficking, terrorist activities and other national security threats.
The company has seen significant growth across its government and financial services contracts and, more importantly, experienced zero customer churn. The new CFO and board members will create long-term value for the company and help to scale its rapid growth. New members of Giant Oak's leadership team include:
Daniel Moser will serve as CFO and will help Giant Oak scale, grow topline revenue and foster business in the Software as a Service (SaaS) and technology space. He brings 20 years of experience in finance, accounting, strategic planning, corporate development, business intelligence and mergers and acquisitions.
Jim Fowler is a veteran technology Chief Executive who will support Giant Oak in its strategic innovation and market leadership. Fowler is the Founder and Executive Chairman of Owler and is a pioneer in the Business-to-Business information industry. He was the founder and CEO of Jigsaw, a company sold to Salesforce in 2010.
Joe Wald brings strategic direction and vision in corporate financing initiatives and will support Giant Oak with targeted growth opportunities. Wald is founder and CEO at Clearpool Group and will share his years of industry expertise in business, finance and management.
Steve Swoboda is a digital entrepreneur with extensive experience in domestic and international mergers and acquisitions. Swoboda is a founder and the Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer of SpotXchange. He will bring his financial acumen to Giant Oak to support the company's growth trajectory.
Tom Vander Schaaff is an experienced analyst, risk management expert and strategic leader, and will help Giant Oak further expand into commercial verticals. Vander Schaaff is the General Partner at Edison Partners and has nineteen years of private equity expertise and three years of investment banking experience.
"Our new CFO and new board members will foster long-term support, strategy and growth for Giant Oak's expanding portfolio of customers and continued technological innovation," said Dr. Gary Shiffman, Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Giant Oak. "This announcement also marks four years since we secured our first sale with GOST. Since then we have had tremendous growth, and our customers within the national defense and security, financial services and private corporate risk industries continue to look to Giant Oak to help them solve some of their most complex challenges in mission-critical operations. Our new leadership will help scale our team and continue to advance our technology that uses social science to identify bad actors and make the world a safer place. I welcome everyone to the Giant Oak team and I am looking forward to a successful and productive future."
GOST, a patent pending SaaS platform, combines technology and behavioral science to help business and government identify and act upon potential threats. This expert software ranks actions, actors and communities during the online search and screening process by applying machine analysis to data driven by human behavior. The platform allows users to build custom information domains for high-speed, large-scale, and customer-specific screening. These results foster a safer and freer society by helping organizations see a clearer picture of the people with whom they transact, and they enable easier and smarter decision-making while reducing cost, time and error.
About Giant Oak
Giant Oak combines data and behavioral science to help business and government identify potential threats during the online search and screening process. Led by a team of social scientists, machine learning experts, and security professionals, the company provides a system known as GOST which expertly searches the deep web to reveal and rank otherwise-hidden actions, actors, and communities. GOST's human-centered design principles apply machine learning to publicly available information enabling organizations to see a clearer picture of the people with whom they transact. The government, financial and regulatory organizations, and national security agencies use GOST to comply with Customer Due Diligence (CDD) processes, reduce false negatives, increase data confidence, and enable smarter and easier decision-making. For more information, visit www.giantoak.com.
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