Jul 19, 2018   SOURCE: BusinessWire

Giant Oak Closes $10 Million in Growth Capital from Edison Partners

Giant Oak, a leader in applying artificial intelligence, machine learning, and big data analytics for the security needs of government and industry, announced today a $10 million investment from leading growth equity investor Edison Partners. Proceeds will be used to fuel Giant Oak’s continued growth through expanding sales and marketing, software engineering, and behavioral science-based analytics for its proprietary search platform, Giant Oak Search Technology (GOST®).

GOST was initially developed to screen the open, deep and dark web, and other data to help national security and law enforcement officials identify human trafficking, terrorist activities, and other security threats. GOST’s capabilities have since expanded into the commercial sector as a leading regulatory technology (RegTech) to help industries, including financial institutions, meet compliance requirements spanning KYC, anti-corruption and anti-money laundering (AML) regulations, as well as to manage and avoid reputational, regulatory, financial, and crime risk. Where banks previously manually reviewed hundreds of customers to identify suspicious activity, banks can now find the same negative conduct by examining as few as three cases and realize up to 97 percent in total cost savings. The company has seen significant growth across its government and financial services contracts and, importantly, experienced zero customer churn.

“GOST delivers to national defense and security, law enforcement, financial services and private corporate risk managers the best solution to identify evidence of and manage human threats in a fraction of the time,” said Dr. Gary Shiffman, Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Giant Oak. “We combine quantitative methods, social science and computer science to screen for ‘bad actors’ and provide a unique, disruptive, and scalable solution with a cost-effective answer. We exist to identify illicit activity and negative media search information of interest to our clients. From screening for benefits like security clearances, customer acquisition, and recruiting, to helping identify terrorists and insider threats, and cybersecurity monitoring, GOST gives decision makers the information they need when it counts.”

Tom Vander Schaaff, General Partner of Edison Partners will join Giant Oak’s board of directors. "Giant Oak has built a security solution that is not only changing but disrupting the way government and industry mitigate risk when performing background investigations on the Internet," said Vander Schaaff. "What this team has developed over the last five years is a major advance in the search and retrieval industry and is demonstrating hard ROI for customers. We're excited to help Giant Oak further accelerate and scale growth.”

GOST, a patent pending SaaS platform, combines behavioral science, artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms that constantly improve themselves across each domain and each search, leading to better results and user experiences. The platform allows users to build custom information domains for high-speed, large-scale, and customer-specific screening, minimizing false positives in investigations to optimize human time and conduct continuous evaluation on large entity data sets. The company is well-positioned for continued government and financial services traction and naturally fits with a much broader set of industry customer bases and use-cases.

“Edison is an ideal partner for Giant Oak, and for more than our capital needs,” said Dr. Shiffman. “Their team possesses expertise in our business model and target markets, and access to their Edison Edge platform gives us an extra boost of capability to realize our vision and growth plans.”

Dr. Shiffman, a Georgetown University professor and former Chief of Staff at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, has worked on anti-terrorism and homeland defense issues, advised U.S. Senators as a National Security and Senior Policy Adviser, and served policy, planning and operational positions in the U.S. Department of Defense. He is also a decorated U.S. Navy Gulf War veteran.

About Giant Oak

Arlington, VA-based Giant Oak is a data analytics software company led by behavioral scientists, security professionals, and software engineers who expertly apply technologies to support law enforcement, national security, compliance, trafficking, fraud, and other illicit actives. Founded in 2012, Giant Oak software employs artificial intelligence and machine learning to support behavioral-science based analytical tool development. The company's software-based solution, GOST, simplifies negative media searches and searching in publicly-available information, tasks which historically produce overwhelming amounts of false information. For more information, visit www.giantoak.com.

About Edison Partners

For more than 30 years, Edison Partners has been helping CEOs and their executive teams navigate the entrepreneurial journey and build successful companies. Through the unique combination of growth capital and the Edison Edge platform, consisting of operating leverage, the Edison Director Network, and executive education, Edison employs a holistic approach to accelerating growth and creating value for businesses ($5 to $20 million in revenue) in financial, healthcare and enterprise technology sectors. Edison investment objectives also include: buyouts, recapitalizations, spinouts and secondary stock purchases. Edison’s active portfolio has created aggregate market value exceeding $10 billion. Its long-tenured team based in Princeton, NJ manages more than $1 billion in assets throughout the eastern United States.