David Benigson: Co-founder and CEO of Signal AI

0:00Elliot Moss:Shop the Sherwin-Williams Fall Sale and get 35 % off paints and stains September 15th through the 21st with prices starting at$29.86. Whether you're refreshing your interior or exterior, we've got the colors to bring your vision to life. And with delivery, getting everything to your door is easier than ever. Shop online to have it delivered or visit your neighborhood Sherwin-Williams store. Click the banner to learn more. Retail sales only, some exclusions apply. See store for details. Delivery available on qualifying orders. Welcome to the Jazz Shapers podcast from Mishkondorea. What you're about to hear was originally broadcast on Jazz FM.

0:36Elliot Moss:However, the music has been cut due to rights issues. The world's greatest jazz, soul and blues. From the world's greatest artists. This is Jazz FM. Jazz Shapers with Elliot Moss in partnership with Mishkondorea. It's business, but it's personal. Welcome to Jazz Shapers with me, Elliot Moss. And today we have a very special encore edition of Jazz Shapers. That means alongside music from the shapers of jazz, soul and blues, we're welcoming back a past business shaper. It is none other than David Benningson, co-founder and CEO of Signal AI, a reputation and risk intelligence company. And David last joined us in September 2021.

1:19Elliot Moss:And a fair bit may have happened since then. Working for his parents' executive search business, the MBS Group, and spending hours manually curating stories for the industry newsletter, David spotted a gap in the market for a tech-based solution to deliver insight at scale. Having tested his hypothesis in talks with top CEOs from FTSE 250 companies, as well as PhD students working in artificial intelligence and machine learning, David launched Cigna AI from his parents' garage in 2013, with data scientist and academic Dr. Miguel Martinez and tech consultant Wesley Hall. They aim to use AI to scan vast amounts of global information, from news and social media to regulatory data, in order to flag emerging risks before they become a crisis and help senior leaders make better decisions.

2:02Elliot Moss:Signal AI now serves, wait for it, over 800 global organizations in over 75 languages. And last year, they raised an eye-watering, I have to say, eye-watering$165 million as they look to expand in the US and develop their next-level predictive AI. Welcome back. Thank you. It's as if I saw you yesterday. Not at all. five years yes i i remember some of the um accusations over the years about this guy's talking in a sci-fi future that's never going to happen i remember reading about it and thinking yeah it does sound a bit crazy that this stuff is going to be possible but here we are it's 2026 david and the world of sci-fi has become the world of reality absolutely yes well i i guess a huge debt of gratitude to Sam Altman and OpenAI because my mum finally understands what it is that I do exactly.

2:55And a lot of the things that we were talking about five years ago that didn't necessarily feel real quite yet have certainly become a lot more real. And it is moving incredibly fast in the space of AI. I think things that we dreamed up might be possible when we founded the business 10 years ago, you know, are coming into fruition in a very, very powerful way. And I think most people are still trying to grapple with what this all means, what the impact is going to be, what are the opportunities, what are the risks and threats with this new form of technology, because it is sort of seeping its way into almost every aspect of our life pretty rapidly.

3:32Totally.

3:33Elliot Moss:Yes. Quite hard, though, in the early days when you've got to sell something before it's been made. Yes, yes. Well, you know, 10 years ago, we were met with a lot of skepticism when we first started talking about AI. I think, you know, many, many organizations, many business leaders who are our clients at Signal AI didn't quite believe that there was a new way of doing things and that this technology was going to be as sort of profoundly impactful to their organizations as it is quickly becoming. So, you know, there's a lot of convincing to do. There's a lot of sort of category creation. You know, we were pretty early in including AI in our name, calling ourselves Signal AI, and taking this sort of fundamental research coming out of academia and applying it into this world of corporate intelligence and risk intelligence.

4:16I think what ChatGPT specifically has done is it's brought that technology to the masses in a way that we just hadn't quite seen before. And now, obviously, you open up your phone and any sort of question that you have, whether it's drafting a text to a loved one or what sort of holiday tips you need when you're planning your next vacation or writing an email to someone in a work context, you ask these systems a question and it doesn't give you a list of results like a Google search engine. it gives you an answer. And that shift from a search engine to an answer engine, I think, has just blown up our imagination of what's feasible and possible.

4:55And I think now what's incredible is this next frontier is here, which is called agentic AI, where you can start actually setting these AI agents' tasks, and they will go off autonomously and go and do things for you and complete parts of your work life or your personal life on your behalf, almost as if you have this digital assistant. And so, yeah, things that we were talking about, and I was putting in fundraising decks 10 years ago, and investors were telling me, you know, maybe that was a little bit of a stretch or wasn't necessarily something they believed. You just made that up, didn't you, David?

5:28You just felt like saying it. Yeah, has now become true. So in lots of ways, we feel vindicated, but in many other ways, we're just very, very excited about what opportunities this now presents for both our organization and also for the clients that we service.

5:42Elliot Moss:David Bengtson is my business shaper. He's back five years later to talk about where Signal AI is going and the incredible change, David, because when we first met, your business was a few years old. How many people were working for you in 2021? Gosh, we probably were 50-odd people. And today? And we're about 250 now. And then you were in one country? Then we were in one country. We were just in the UK, and today we're in the US, the UK, Lisbon, and Hong Kong as well. so we're sort of straddling. You just chose Lisbon for the food. We just chose Lisbon. I would do the same. For the food, the pastel donata.

6:17And the people are amazing. And the people and the fun. But no, it's actually been, Lisbon has been, and Portugal has been a great place for us to sort of continue to build more talent and it is booming there in terms of technology and the sort of software ecosystem.

6:29Elliot Moss:But 50 to 250, that's a thing. I mentioned when I introduced you at the beginning, there's been a small amount of investment into you, $265 million, which sounds like a hell of a lot. What does it feel like running that business now versus in the old days in the garage, in the old days five years ago? What's going on for you emotionally? Well, I think you learn to adapt as a founder of a scale-up company, of a fast-growing technology business. Sort of one of the truisms is almost every six months the business changes dramatically, and it has done since we founded it in the garage. And that's partly what makes it so fun.

7:07but it also makes it incredibly demanding. And you've got to be the sort of chief learning officer if you want to remain relevant and stay ahead of the curve as the founder. Almost every six to 12 months, you have to adapt and figure out what's the next set of challenges that you need to solve and you need to be sort of right there at the frontier of the business sort of fixing things and solving things. So I get all that, right?

7:30Elliot Moss:I buy all that. The bit, though, how that's impacting you, you're a young dad. Yes. Literally, one-year-old boy. Congratulations. Thank you. The best is yet to come. But emotionally, David, it's a thing. You're doing something really major, which most people don't do in life, and there you are. So how are you processing all of this stuff? Well, I... I'm sure you're the chief learning officer. Yes. You're going to deal with that because you're a really smart guy, but the emotional thing, how are you coping with that? Well, I wish I could say that you spend lots of... I spend lots of time sort of reflecting on that and thinking about how I'm processing it, but you just don't have enough time, you know, one of the things I find myself being is just constantly forward looking, you know, what is the next thing?

8:14What is the next challenge? What is the next opportunity? And you have even less time now that I have a one year old. So, you know, balancing those two things, whilst having a very sort of demanding, but inspiring job, pretty much fills the time allotted pretty well. But you try and make space? You just don't really have that opportunity to sort of stop and pause very, very rarely. I think my nature and sort of what continues to drive me is to always look forward and to be sort of positively excited about what's coming next. He looks excited, by the way. And in a world that is just moving so fast right now in my world with new technology, new innovation, new opportunity almost happening every week, you sort of have to just be fixated on what's coming next and you don't tend to spend much time looking backwards, frankly.

9:06He's now reflecting.

9:07Elliot Moss:As I'm looking, he's going, I really ought to think about this. Next time I meet Elliot, I'm going to say, actually, I thought, and I'm in a really good place. Stay with me for much more for my business shaper. It's David Bennington. He's the founder of Signal AI, along with some other clever people. And he is thinking about the future right now, as well as trying not to think about the past. Much more coming up from him in a couple of minutes. We're also now going to hear a taster from the Mishcon Academy digital sessions, which can be found on your podcast platform of choice. Mishkan D 'Ore's Ashley Williams and Michael Rose, a senior associate at DRD Partnership, discuss how companies can navigate their own AI strategy.

9:40The Mishkan Academy Digital Sessions. Conversations on the legal topics affecting businesses and individuals today.

9:48Elliot Moss:What are the top tips for companies or advisors of companies to help them navigate AI strategy and really cut through all the noise that's out there? So I think there's a couple of things they can do. First of all, recognize where AI could fit into your operations and what you do. It's one of those things where you can easily get lost in all the potential different things you could do with it. But start out with a what do we actually deliver on a day-to-day basis? What are the AI tools that are available? And therefore, where could we fit them in? Secondly, how can AI impact your ability to deliver your service?

10:23Elliot Moss:So it could be an external thing. It could be that AI could be used from the outside and could impact your ability to deliver. So in our line of communications, we're increasingly aware that AI tools can be used to potentially create hostile campaigns against our clients. Or increasingly, the way that people are looking into companies or entities or individuals is by using AI tools rather than perhaps the more traditional Google search. So identifying where those external factors are. and then if you're trying to get your positive message out there because you're using AI in a really innovative sense that you want people to know more about how can you make that story linked to a real tangible everyday impact that people can really get behind I think it's easy with a topic like this to get lost in some quite technical quite jargony language but how can you get your argument down in simple terms that people will understand and can immediately relate to And similarly, if you're using AI in a more complex way that perhaps might create a bit of uncertainty or a bit of fear in your target audience, how can you explain in a simple way that they will understand what you're doing, why you're doing it, and how it maybe isn't something for them to be too worried about?

11:40Elliot Moss:The Mishcon Academy Digital Sessions. To access advice for businesses that is regularly updated, please visit mishcon.com. This is Jazz Shapers with Elliot Moss in partnership with Mishkondorea. It's business, but it's personal. You can hear all our former business shapers on the Jazz Shapers podcast and you can hear this very program again if you pop Jazz Shapers into your favorite podcast platform. My guest today for a special encore edition of Jazz Shapers is David Bengtson, co-founder and CEO of Signal AI, a reputation and risk intelligence company. I mentioned at the beginning also 800 companies, huge scale now.

12:19Elliot Moss:The product itself, and when I was doing my research, the product isn't a product. There are many products. How do you develop the next iterations? I was impressed by the range of things that are going on from the top 500 companies on one sort of ladder of measurements to other little products that you've built. What's inspiring those various features and the different user experiences you're trying to give to companies? Yeah, we spend a lot of time speaking to our customers and asking them what their biggest challenges are. When we last spoke on this show five years ago, I mean, think about just how much has changed, how much volatility, how many issues, you know, big organizations have had to grapple with since then.

13:02Five years ago, it was all about COVID. Prior to that, it was Brexit. Now we've got geopolitical issues, supply chain issues. You know, three years ago, all of our clients were obsessing about D &I. Now, no one wants to speak about D &I. Organizations are having to navigate this sort of minefield of external volatility. And so we spend a lot of time getting close to our customers and thinking about how can our technology essentially help them think around corners and be more preemptive and predictive. A big part of our focus right now is organizations typically get to the issue when it's already materialized, and they all want to get to the issue ahead of time in a more predictive way.

13:40and so that drives a lot of our roadmap and a lot of the strategy of how we're going to deploy our technology. How can we help our clients get earlier to the issue, to the risk, help them get ahead of it and then help them have the data to be able to diagnose and mitigate those issues and so that's a big part of what drives our focus.

13:58Elliot Moss:And of course the more dependent you are and the more central AI is, you've then got your own question around accuracy. You've got your own question around morality, you know, the ethics of AI. How does that manifest itself in your business? Well, it's one of our key differentiators. I think in a world where AI is becoming more available and ubiquitous, what differentiates an organization like Signal AI? It's the quality of the data and content that we have access to that others don't. It's the ethical way we manage that content and data and ensure that what we're offering our clients is ultimately compliant so that we protect rights holders and content creators to ensure that the data and content we're delivering to that end client is being sourced in the right and appropriate way.

14:44And you do that in real time, David? And we do that in real time. And so that's a big part of our value proposition. But ultimately, why our clients trust us versus others is because when we provide a signal, they know that there is a quality and accuracy threshold that we have built into our platform over 10 years, trained and evolved through our clients' feedback that ensures that when we send that rag report, when we send a red alert to someone senior at a board level or a C-level executive, they're going to open that report and they're going to know that it's not a false positive, that it's something that they really should pay attention to and take heed of.

15:21Elliot Moss:Do you get it wrong, though? Is it wrong sometimes? Of course, yeah. And then what? What's the way you deal with that? Does that actually improve the product next time? Exactly. So then we feed that back in and we've got the benefit of a decade's worth of feedback from customers and from our own teams and analysts who are then retraining our models and re-inputting back into our engine and our system. As you're talking, I'm just thinking about like you're creating a new machine, which many businesses are having to do. Is that how you see it? Do you see it as if I'm David in charge of a factory?

15:47Elliot Moss:I don't know what the factory looks like, but I've got to ally these outputs over here with different processes and different systems and then technology, which enables you to actually see things, as I just mentioned, in real time. That is sort of invention, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, ultimately, what AI is enabling us to do on a whole number of different levels is take factories that used to require huge amounts of human capital and be able to compress that and scale that into something that can be fully automated and digitized. And so what we're doing is we're taking an age-old process of people scouring open source intelligence to find the needles in the haystack and the signals of information that are going to help them make better decisions.

16:30and we are compressing that into something that can be digitized and therefore scaled across all countries, all markets, all media types, all data types, all languages and done in a fraction of a second. And when you think about that ability to compress a process like that, the opportunities and the outputs can be really profound.

16:51Elliot Moss:Our children, your young son of one, my children of 21, 19, 18, 13, what's your advice to them in terms of AI and where their lives will go and careers they may choose because obviously you've got views on that as soon as you're in it well it's an incredibly sort of challenging and complex question because things are changing so dramatically and and as we've discussed moving so fast and I and I have been thinking deeply about you know what are the skills or the the types of education that that I want you know my own child to go through in a in in a world that is, you know, changing so rapidly around us.

17:27And initially, you know, you would think, and I was thinking, that, you know, the STEM-type skills are the ones that are going to be fundamental to be relevant in the future, you know, science and technology, engineering and maths. But actually, those are the areas that I think AI is very, very quickly proving to be capable of, you know, automating almost out of existence. You know, take software engineering, which was the high barrier to entry in my world to building and creating and innovating. And that is being transformed rapidly where anyone, you or I, you know, lack of domain expertise or otherwise, can now build and create code through natural language, you know, through vibe coding.

18:11And that is, you know, incredible. But it is lowering the barrier to entry dramatically. So my view actually has changed to being much more focused on what are the unique human capabilities and skills that we can dial up in our next generation. It's actually those skills around intuition and critical thinking and creativity and human relationships. Those are the things that are unscrapable and that AI is going to continue to struggle to be able to automate to the quality and to the level that we can achieve. And so, bizarrely now, I would rather have my kid, you know, focus on humanities perhaps than I would on some of those more STEM-based.

18:53Elliot Moss:He's only one, though, so don't do that yet. It might be a little fast. Right now, it's lots of nursery rhymes. Yeah, I'm sure. I'm sure. And also, the other thing is you were never a technologist. You may love technology like me. I love technology. But your background, you did a postgraduate law school, didn't you? Exactly. You did all that. Exactly. And it kind of doesn't matter. in a way, you look at this as a business and you happen to then have very clever technologists around you. Agreed, agreed. But I always looked with huge admiration at both my co-founders and then the technical people in my organization who really were the key, the secret sauce to actually make whatever we were dreaming of come to fruition.

19:33What's interesting now is those functions are converging and the lines are getting more and more blurred between what is a product strategist, what is an engineering manager, what is an AI researcher, what is someone who understands the business problem. And the tools that we now have available to us are enabling all of us to be able to dip into and start creating technology and software with a very, very low barrier to entry. And so the opportunities are tremendous. All of us can pick up Claude or ChatGPT today and start writing code. We do not need that background or that expertise. And so the floodgates are opening to even more innovation, I think, and opportunity.

20:17Elliot Moss:Stay with me for a final chat with David Benningsen. And we've got some music from GoGoPenguin. That's all coming up in just a moment. Don't go anywhere. This is Just Shapers with Elliot Moss in partnership with Mishkondorea. It's business, but it's personal. David Benningsen is my business shaper. He's here back after five years. He said, yes, I'll do it if you really want me to. and you did, thank you, I appreciate that. So the amount of money that's been invested in your business is a lot by anyone's standards and definitely in recent times that signals, excuse the pun, that they've bought something that they really believe.

20:53Elliot Moss:Battery Ventures, I think, have invested in you and become a majority of shareholders. That is a big responsibility for you, isn't it? I mean, do you think about it? Or is it just another day, it's changed, we had to do it, thank you very much, we move on? Or is it a bit more than that? No, no, no, of course. It's a huge responsibility and it's a sort of huge vote of confidence from them. And I think with that responsibility comes significant expectation. But I think we've always had tremendous ambition for what the business could do. And people ask me, gosh, after sort of 10, 11 years, are you tired?

21:29Are you worn out? And actually, in many ways, I feel like I've just literally gone and started. He's horizontal here, by the way. We gave him a pillow. He's having a quick lie down and a time to reflect. Occasional lie down, but that's probably more the one-year-old than the business demands. But I think we feel like it's taken us 10 years to get to sort of ground zero, and actually all of the things that we've built, all of the knowledge and expertise that we've created and the platform and technology that we've developed, that is now giving us the platform to actually go and realize our ambition.

22:00And so the capital and the partnership with Battery Ventures, who I'm very pleased are, you know, they're a US-founded fund, but they're very much a global fund, is all about reflecting that global ambition. It's to take what we've built and what we've started to create, particularly in markets like the US, and really scale what we're doing and grow the number of customers that we work with and help more organizations sort of navigate these complex times. So, yes, there is a lot of responsibility there, but I think it's just more fuel to help us sort of realize the vision that we have.

22:31Elliot Moss:I liken it to sort of a footballer who suddenly went from being paid 100 quid a week to 100 grand a week, you know, and it's like that's big and then it weighs heavily on you. Does it weigh heavily on you? No, because I think we've been building up incrementally step by step. So it's not like we've gone from sort of zero to raising$165 million sort of out of the blue. We've been building this business piece by piece, proving out that we can achieve those next steps and those next stages. And there are gates you sort of have to go through in order to demonstrate that you are ready for that next step.