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Pictured above: Narrative Science team at its Chicago offices
Narrative Science, a Chicago-based startup that uses artificial intelligence software to write news articles and reports, raised $10 million in new investment capital. It also inked a new software licensing agreement with USAA to write financial reports. This latest round of funding comes from USAA and previous investors Sapphire Ventures, Jump Capital and Battery Ventures.
Narrative Science’s software, called Quill, mines data for important information, and then transforms that data into sentences and paragraphs that are nearly indistinguishable from a human writer.
“Every data set, every data base, every spreadsheet has a story to tell. Instead of giving you that story in numbers or pictures, we give it to you in words,” said CEO Stuart Frankel in a video on Narrative Science’s website.
The company started in 2010 at Northwest University as a research project called StatsMonkey that turned baseball box scores into game recaps. From there it has expanded to narrating data in a variety of categories.
Narrative Science’s software currently writes short earnings reports for Forbes.com. It also took an undisclosed investment from the CIA in 2013 and supplies that agency with internal reports. Though initially aimed at publically distributed news articles, the software now mostly sells for financial reporting. For USAA, which provides banking, insurance, investments and retirement services to over 10 million members, Quill will be used to better inform them with narrated financial data.
“Our relationship with USAA will allow both companies to deliver highly-scalable solutions that will turn mountains of financial data into information that can be easily understood and acted on by millions of people,” said Frankel in a statement.
While readable, the reports generated by Quill are matter of fact and formulaic. This is because automation, at its most basic level, is a series of ‘if this, then that’ statements: ‘if you see this written in the financial data, than write it in the article.’ Earnings reports are a good candidate for Quill's automation because journalists and analysts traditionally add little individualistic style or commentary; they just report bare facts.
Early on, Quill’s ability to write articles panicked many journalists as they worried their jobs might be taken by a computer. A quick look at the low view count of the automated Forbes.com articles shows much of those fears are unfounded. While there is value providing readers with matter-of-fact reports, it is at the low end of the value pyramid. Readers tend to engage more with articles that have insights, style and personality. It's not likely those qualities will be automated anytime soon. But, Narrative Science's ability to free up writers from the mundane aspects of writing earnings reports should allow talent to focus even more on higher quality work. That's something journalists and technologists can celebrate together.
This latest round of funding brings Narrative Science’s total funding to $32 million.
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