Kiwi polish adds shining success for soaraway SimSage

The latest success is a deal with a government agency in New Zealand and the company says it is vigorously pursuing another. Talks are also progressing with a growing number of potential clients throughout Europe, CEO and co-founder Sean Wilson tells Business Weekly.

SimSage, which has its R & D centre in Cambridge and offices in Waikato in New Zealand, is experiencing increasing success worldwide with its proposition. The business began as SimSage Ltd in New Zealand in April 2018.

Wilson said “We began developing the software while working in other roles, but then we were approached by the Cornwall Development Company around November 2018, who were looking for Kiwi startups interested in moving to the UK, specifically Cornwall.

“We didn’t believe Cornwall was likely to be suitable as a base in the longer run but we moved there at the start of May 2019 to continue developing the code and to get established in the UK. As a newcomer to the UK, it takes ages to get established with a bank account and credit reference so that you can actually operate here -.but that’s another story!

“It quickly became evident that if we became a UK company there was quite a bit of help available from incubators and from ERDF (grants) which would help accelerate our product development and early marketing activities….so that’s what we did.

“Once we established SimSage Group Ltd, we rolled SimSage Ltd (NZ) under the Group company and established SimSage (UK) Ltd as the UK OpCo. As at this date, SimSage Ltd in NZ hadn’t actually traded as we were selling our software licence into NZ from our UK company.

“We were just starting to win some small customers in early 2020 when Covid came along. That meant we were pretty well stuck in Cornwall for the next 18 months – which wasn’t a bad place to be from a lifestyle perspective, but was frustrating while trying to get the business started in earnest. Also, the sort of customers we wanted were larger than we could find in Cornwall.

“It was around October 2021 that our London-based lawyer suggested we move to Cambridge, and that was a great recommendation. So we started as a NZ enterprise but we are now a UK company with 100 per cent owned OpCos / subsidiaries in the UK and NZ.

“It’s a little bizarre to come halfway around the world from NZ to the UK and then to be winning business back in our home patch, but hey, that works just fine. While as ‘imports’, we’ve struggled to connect into the local Cambridge eco-system, we are just now getting some traction with interest from within the local government and FinServ sectors. We appear to also be suddenly experiencing interest from Europe, with a number of encouraging discussions underway.

“The thing that has made the difference in the past few months is our engagement with collaborative partners who are specialists in the Information Management domain and who have far better-established networks and existing customer-bases in this part of the world than we do.

“All have commented very positively about the SimSage solution set and particularly our ability to bring GenAI to life, in delivering tangible value in the form of increased productivity and enabling risk identification and mitigation."

Wilson says that regardless of the geography, the industry sector, or the size of the organisation, the three core issues in the sector appear to be:-

i) Data Governance: Accessing and inventorying data across myriad, disparate sources and systems, including identifying PII that may be non-compliant, and then rationalising it through de-duplication, archiving/purging. Global analysts report 50-80 per cent of all enterprise data is Dark Data….meaning it’s inaccessible and therefore of no use.

ii) Quickly finding specific enterprise information no matter where it’s filed/stored, and enabling effective use of GenAI to allow users to simply find answers to queries.

iii) Putting that information to use through intelligent data processing (IDP) and workflow automation.

SimSage provides an AI-powered Intelligent Information Management (IIM) platform that helps businesses improve efficiency and reduce risk by finding, categorising and automating information across various internal systems like SharePoint, Google Drive, and iManage.

SimSage's semantic enterprise search and knowledge platform use natural language processing to deliver fast, accurate, and contextual results, enabling companies to securely redact sensitive data, process large datasets, and connect to enterprise data sources without needing to centralise their information.

Wilson adds: “While there are other products and tools in the market for each of these solutions above, our partners and customers are telling us that it’s our ability to deliver all three solutions from the same SimSage platform that they like, and that we can deal with data/systems and process complexity well, where others fall well short.

“That we deliver from any public/private cloud, or in-house where necessary, and that we can engage a wide variety of LLMs, also meets with approval. With the traction we’re starting to see in NZ, and now beginning in Europe, we are keen to work with more collaborative partners, particularly in the UK."