Apoorv Agarwal is the co-founder and CEO of Text IQ, a company that builds applications for identifying sensitive information. It uses AI technology to protect companies from high-stakes legal and compliance disasters.
Life and education
Apoorv Agarwal was born and raised in New Delhi, India. He did his schooling at Sardar Patel Vidyalaya. Agarwal got interested in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning.
In 2006, Agarwal graduated with a Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science from Delhi University. He attended Columbia University in New York City and graduated with a Master’s degree in Computer Science in 2008 and a Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2014.
Early Career
In August 2016, Apoorv Agarwal worked at Conexant Systems as a Software Engineer. Agarwal left Conexant in August 2007. The summer of 2008, Agarwal worked as Intern at Morgan Stanley for two months. In summer of 2011, Agarwal worked as Intern at IBM Research, until August 2012. Before co-founding Text IQ, Agarwal served as Entrepreneurial Lead at Columbia University in New York City in 2014.
Text IQ
In October 2014, Agarwal as CEO and Omar Haroun as COO co-founded Text IQ. The company is based in New York, New York with additional offices in San Francisco, California, and Vancouver, Canada. Text IQ applies AI technology to prevent high-stakes legal, and compliance disasters with customers, including Fortune 200 companies, tech giants, and government agencies.
Text IQ’s proprietary software is capable to efficiently and meticulously analyze big data to identify sensitive, compromising, and privileged documents. Text IQ is supported by some of the most high-profile litigations and government investigations in recent news.
Text IQ builds AI applications for identifying sensitive information to help organizations reduce their latent risk. It also combines social network analysis and natural language processing to extract the structure from unstructured data, mapping language, and people into a Social Linguistic Hypergraph. The company mission is to illuminate the world’s dark data so their customers can make decisions based on total understanding.
Its solutions include Chief Compliance Officer which supports risk, audit, and compliance teams in identifying anomalous or nefarious activity, documents, and people; General Counsel which facilitates users discover documents that could trigger irreparable reputational damage to enterprise; Head of Litigation which lets users to develop case strategies faster by evaluating your entire dataset in a fraction of the time and cost; and Head of e-discovery which helps users to identify privileged, sensitive, and significant documents that are easily missed using search terms.
Text IQ has recorded revenue growth and profitability for eight consecutive quarters while expanding its team 5x in the past eight months, with assumptions of multiplying headcount by the end of 2019. Text IQ’s AI solutions recognize sensitive information at 10x the speed and 4x less cost than conventional strategy – along with decreasing the risk of missing sensitive information by over 50%.
Text IQ designated Aaron Crews as General Counsel and Vice President of Strategy. Crews entered the company after working for three years at Walmart where he was the Global Head of eDiscovery and the Senior Associate General Counsel. Crews spent seven years with San Francisco-based law firm Littler Mendelson before joining Walmart, as a stockholder and one of the counsels at eDiscovery.
In December 2017, Text IQ was named to the prestigious AI 100 list alongside just four other companies in the “Risk & Regulatory Compliance” category. Officially announced as “a ranking of the 100 most promising private artificial intelligence companies in the world,” the list is authored every year by CB Insights, the authority on arising trends in artificial intelligence.
Funding Rounds
Text IQ raised an undisclosed amount in debt financing in May 2015. Text IQ raised $3 million in a venture round from investors FLOODGATE and Alchemist Accelerator, which values the company approximately $6 million in this round in September 2016. Text IQ raised $12.6 million in a Series A round, led by FirstMark with the participation from investor Sierra Ventures in June 2019.
The latest funding round was for its sensitive information detection tool. The service supported businesses and government agencies to comply with privacy legislation and laws requiring exclusion of personally identifiable information. The funding also helped develop Text IQ’s AI research and engineering team, as well as its sales and marketing teams. Funds used in spurring growth in Ireland and the European Union, where companies need to comply with GDPR privacy laws.
Text IQ has raised a total of $15.6 million in its three rounds of funding. Text IQ has $8 million in an estimated revenue annually. Text IQ also competes with Everlaw, BigID, and DISCO.