Buoyed by a new cash infusion of $5.5 million in Series A funding, GlobalWonks emerged Tuesday as Enquire AI.
The Washington, D.C.-based company leverages artificial intelligence in a tool for businesses to find global subject-matter expertise in real time, from both internal and external resources.
Uzabase led the oversubscribed funding round and was joined by Teneo Ventures, Blu Ventures and a group of angel investors. This gives the company $6.1 million in total funding to date.
Enquire, then known as GlobalWonks, was started in 2018 by Bilal Baloch, Cenk Sidar and Fatih Orhan after realizing that professionals are untapped resources.
“To understand the regulatory environment in Kenya or public health in Indonesia, you have to know how to get that information,” COO Baloch told TechCrunch. “You might go to an expensive company that relied on an expert that was not on the ground there or the information was not fresh.”
Instead, its Network Pulse technology taps into those “wonks” through a question-based tool where someone would ask a question and receive bite-sized answers in real time from more than 40,000 possible experts based on expertise tags.
By providing short answers, it enables experts to take minutes versus hours and for an additional revenue stream for their expertise. Question-askers can also schedule additional time with experts to go more in depth on a topic.
The name change to “Enquire” signifies the company going beyond the “wonks” into new abilities, like through API integrations in adjacent SaaS platforms, so that company employees can tap into the minds and insights of their colleagues, Baloch said.
He estimates the expert network market is $1 billion, and with these new capabilities and name change, Enquire can jump into the market research market, which was projected to be valued at $73 billion in 2020. Indeed, other companies in this space are attracting venture capital as well. Last week, NewtonX raised $32 million for its tool aimed at democratizing access to high-quality data and research, while Wonder scales up a research team based on a topic.
By going after the Series A funding the company wants to diversify its portfolio of knowledge technology offerings and will be deploying the new capital into team expansion, marketing and rolling out new API partnerships.
Enquire works with 50 companies around the world and across them 300 clients. In the past 12 months, the company’s revenue grew by 300% and the expert network grew by 207%.
“They are truly re-inventing how we receive and give expertise through technology and we’re glad to invest in a company that has the interest of all parties in mind, said Yusuke Umeda, co-founder of Uzabase, in a written statement. “This puts a significant value on research, resources and application of this data to make important decisions daily.”