Albuquerque data analytics firm wins $3 million investment

Albuquerque-based data analytics firm RS21 won $3 million in funding from San Francisco-based Thayer Ventures to scale its operations on domestic and international markets, the company announced Tuesday morning.

It’s the startup’s first venture investment since launching in 2015. To date, the company has grown organically, boot-strapping its own operations and expansion through income from the data services it provides to local and national customers. And, in recent years, RS21 has gained substantial market traction, leading to national recognition for some of the products and services it’s developed.

Now, with demand for artificial intelligence, or AI-infused data analytics, booming across the globe, RS21 plans to ramp up its management and technical teams to better compete on a global scale in the AI industry.

“Globally, we’re entering what’s called the fourth industrial revolution where economies and governments are driven by data and artificial intelligence,” RS21 President and CEO Charles Rath told the Journal. “There’s a massive amount of interest in it, with Fortune-500 companies racing to get an edge, and governments looking to AI as a lever to support global power. We’ve been working in this field for eight years, and we’re now incredibly well poised to really scale as a company and compete.”

The new financing will help RS21 turn the technologies it’s already created through contracts with individual customers into staple products and services that can be offered to more companies in many industries. To do that, it will hire another 30 employees over the next two years, including technical staff and new team managers to lead expansion efforts, Rath said.

“We’ll use the investor dollars to hire world-class talent and get RS21 products into more markets,” Rath said. “We’ve been blessed with great talent in New Mexico, but this allows us to level up with more industry experts and well-trained staff to compete on a global scale. And Thayer Ventures is very skilled at helping to scale companies like ours.”

Thayer has offices in Santa Fe. It received a $7.5 million commitment in 2020 from the New Mexico State Investment Council’s private equity program, which channels money from the Severance Tax Permanent Fund into venture funds that invest in local startups.

Thayer Managing Director Mark Farrell said RS21 is at a turning point.

“They’ve done incredible work for a vast array of clients, but RS21 has reached an inflection point where it can now build on the IT capabilities it’s developed through individual projects and turn them into products with broad market applications,” Farrell told the Journal. “They’ve done a great job boot-strapping the company. But this is about taking the company to the next phase of development to grow and scale.”

RS21 — short for “resilient solutions for the 21st century” — specializes in packaging mounds of information into user-friendly dashboards with maps, graphics and point-and-click tools that help researchers and decision-makers quickly understand the root causes of issues and take speedy action when needed . It created a data analytics and visualization platform dubbed “MOTHR” that converts massive data sets into easily understandable web-based interfaces at super-fast speeds.

During the pandemic, it used MOTHR to rapidly build interactive online maps for 500 cities, offering detailed information about local neighborhoods and communities that helped government agencies and medical professionals make critical decisions on how to best allocate scarce resources.

More recently, it built a state-of-the-art informatics system for the University of New Mexico Comprehensive Cancer Center that makes a vast array of disparate information immediately accessible through a user-friendly visual dashboard for cancer research, diagnostics and treatment. Researchers and clinical staff can now rapidly collate mounds of data in ways they couldn’t before because needed information was spread across many different places with little, if any, integration.

The company also built an AI-based system for remote monitoring of satellites that detects problems before they arise, allowing ground operators to intervene in advance of failures to extend satellite functionality.

“Some 60% of the satellites we send into space fail prematurely, so this helps get ahead of that to trouble-shoot from the ground,” Rath said.

Thayer Ventures generally invests in travel and transportation businesses. It hopes to apply RS21 data analytics tools to those industries as well.

“We believe their AI technology can significantly impact the travel industry,” Farrell said. “We’re very excited about the company.”

RS21 grew its revenue from $1.87 million in 2017 to $8.5 million in 2021, earning it top spots on the Journal’s Flying 40 list of fast-growing technology companies for the last three years.

With Thayer’s backing, the company could enter a new phase of accelerated growth, said RS21 board member Dale Dekker of architecture firm Dekker/Perich/Sabatini.

“It can help the company develop more products to accelerate its growth in the data analytics space,” Dekker told the Journal. “It’s an opportunity to grow to the next level.”