The first two words that come to mind after meeting Dan Secretan, co-founder of the UK-based AI-powered due diligence platform Xapien, are witty and dapper.
In the latest video series edition of Techtalks with TFN, we met him in the inspiring surroundings of Home Grown, the private members’ club for founders and entrepreneurs just around the corner from Marble Arch.
You can see the whole interview on our YouTube Channel.
From special constable to tech innovator: Secretan’s unique journey
Secretan’s background is mixed — he must be one of the few founders to have spent time as a special constable — but it was when he joined BAE Systems that the ideas behind Xapien were formed. “I was really working in financial crime. And my whole my career for the last 20 years has been fighting financial crimes and fraud, or know-your-customer,” he told us. “Helping banks really understand the people that they’re doing business with.”
And it was at BAE that he met Xapien’s co-founder, Shaun O’Mahony. “He was building systems and software systems to do large-scale investigations, mainly for specialist law enforcement and national security purposes,” Secretan explained. “What they were doing was using internet data to help run investigations.”
It was the combination of the two that led them to develop the idea that led to them founding Xapien in 2018. Xapien’s product, says Secretan, allows you to know who you are doing business with, “there’s a lot of information out there, but how to you find it and distill it?,” he asked. “We harnessed what was the very beginnings of AI and the technologies that were coming out, and built a system, which creates a report on any person or company in the world in minutes.”
The platform offers a unique overview, checking the usual sources and records as part of its due diligence, but it goes further. “It will also read all the media and content and blogs that are about whoever you’re searching for,” Secretan said. “And it will stitch all of those bits together to give you a comprehensive picture.”
The additional context is especially important in an age where reputation matters to consumers as much as the products. “A lot of our customers are charities, and they’re using Xapien, for donor due diligence,” Secretan explained. “So before they take a large donation on, they really want to understand who is this person or this organisation giving me this money? … If we put our brand name with their brand name, what implications does that have?”
Developing AI ahead of the curve
Secretan also discussed the challenges they faced, not least the difficulty of funding in the early days when they needed to build their product they couldn’t sell until it was complete. “We had to convince angel investors that we were onto something, this really could be a truly disruptive play, that the world of checking against databases really had its day,” said Secretan.
It meant that it was three years from founding before Xapien was ready for its first client. One challenge was beginning development before large-language models were being widely developed. “When we founded, AI was much more about image recognition,” said Secretan. “We were talking in those days about natural language processing.”
It meant that they were having to develop new ways to find information. Secretan joked that you might take your chances Googling his name, but with a more common name, like Chris Green, it gets harder. “Getting that disambiguation to separate out the golfer from Colorado, from the folk singer in Sydney, to the tech entrepreneur in London. That’s a really difficult challenge,” he said. “We spent a lot of time and a lot of our r&d budget on that.”
Focusing on Xapien’s growth
The investment is paying off. Xapien has seen significant growth, increasing revenue by 150% in the last year, and doubling their team to 45 people, although Secretan is modest about it. “150% is great,” he said. “But of course, it starts with small numbers. And those big percentages are easier to achieve!”
However, Secretan is confident growth will continue. “We’re seeing people buying the system, using it, subscribing to it, loving it, and then just really building up their usage.” Having just closed a $10 million Series A round led by YFM Equity Partners, they are well positioned for further growth.
For those hoping to follow that startup path, we also asked Secretan for his advice. For him, the secret of success is a narrow focus, even when it means resisting the siren call of the latest trends. “I think the piece of advice that I was given early on, which rankled with me a bit, but it’s definitely true, is that you have to focus very narrowly on the problem that you’re solving, and not building tech for the sake of tech.”
This article is part of a media partnership with Xapien and Homegrown. For partnering opportunities, contact [email protected]m or [email protected].
