Welcome to the Jazz Shapers Podcast from Mishcon de Reya. What you are about to hear was originally broadcast on Jazz FM, however, the music has been cut due to rights issues.
Elliot Moss
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 welcome back a past Business Shaper. It is none other than David Benigson, Co-Founder and CEO of Signal AI, a reputation and risk intelligence company and David last joined us in September 2021, and a fair bit may have happened since then. Working for his parent’s 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 delivering site 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 Signal AI from his parent’s garage in 2013. With data scientists and academic doctor, Miguel Martinez and tech consultant, Wesley Hall. They aimed 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. Signal AI now serves – wait for it – over 800 global organisations in over 75 languages and last year they raised an eye watering I have to say, eye watering 165 million dollars as a they look to expand in the US and develop their next level predictive AI.
Welcome back.
David Benigson
Thank you, thank you.
Elliot Moss
It’s as if I saw you yesterday.
David Benigson
Thank you.
Elliot Moss
Not at all. Five years.
David Benigson
Yes.
Elliot Moss
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.
David Benigson
Absolutely yes. Well I guess a huge, uh, debt of gratitude to Sam Altman and OpenAI because, uh, my mum finally understands what it is that I do exactly and, uh, a lot of the things that we were talking about five years ago, that, that didn’t necessarily feel real quite yet have certainly become a lot more real and, uh, 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 it’s way into almost every aspect of our life, pretty rapidly so.
Elliot Moss
Seriously.
David Benigson
Yes.
Elliot Moss
Quite hard though in the early days when you’ve got to sell something before it’s been made?
David Benigson
Yes, yes. Well, you know, 10 years ago we were met with a lot of scepticism when we first started talking about AI. I think, you know, many, many organisations, many business leaders who are our clients at Signal AI, didn’t quite believe that, that there was a new way of doing things and that this technology was going to be as sort of profoundly impactful to their, to their organisations as it is quickly becoming so, you know, there was a lot of convincing to do. There’s a lot of sort of category creation, um, you know, we were pretty early in, 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, of corporate intelligence and risk intelligence. I 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 know, you open up your phone and any sort of question that you have, whether it’s you know, drafting a text to a loved one or, you know, what, what sort of holiday tips you need when you’re, when you’re planning your next vacation or writing an email, you know, 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, of what’s feasible and possible. Um, and I think now what’s, what’s incredible is this next frontier is here which is called Agentic AI where you can start setting these AI agents tasks and they will go off, you know, 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 decs 10 years ago and investors were telling me, you know, maybe that was a little bit of a stretch or, uh, wasn’t necessary…
Elliot Moss
You just made that up didn’t you David. You just felt like saying it.
David Benigson
Yeah. It’s now become, it’s now become true so in lots of ways we feel vindicated, uh, but in many other ways we’re just very, very excited about what, what opportunities this now presents for both our organisation and also for the clients that we service.
Elliot Moss
David Benigson’s my Business Shaper. He’s back 5 years later to talk about where Signal AI is going and the incredible change David, because when, when we first met your business was a few years old. How many people were working for you in 2021? Roughly?
David Benigson
We were probably were 50 odd people.
Elliot Moss
And today?
David Benigson
And we are about 250 now, um.
Elliot Moss
Then you were in one country?
David Benigson
Then we were in one country, we were just in the UK and today we are in the US, the UK, Lisbon and Hong Kong as well. So we’re sort of straddling.
Elliot Moss
You just chose Lisbon for the food.
David Benigson
We just chose Lisbon…
Elliot Moss
I would do the same.
David Benigson
…for the food, the pastel de nata…
Elliot Moss
And the people are amazing.
David Benigson
…uh, amazing and the people and the fun. But, uh, 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.
Elliot Moss
Yeah.
David Benigson
And it, it is booming there in terms of technology and the sort of software ecosystems.
Elliot Moss
Yeah. But 50 to 250, that’s a thing.
David Benigson
Yes.
Elliot Moss
I mentioned when I introduced at the beginning there’s been a small amount of investment in to you, 165 million dollars 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 5 years ago. What’s going on for you emotionally?
David Benigson
Well I think we, you, you learn to adapt as, as a founder of a, of a scale up company of a fast growing, uh, technology business. Sort of one of the, the true instances is almost every six months the business changes dramatically and it has done, uh, since we founded it in the garage and that’s partly what makes it, what makes it so fun. But it also makes it incredibly demanding and you sort of, you’ve got to be the sort of chief, chief learning officer if you want to remain relevant and stay ahead of the, the curve as the founder. Almost every six to twelve months you have to adapt and figure out what the next set of challenges that you need to, to solve and you need to be sort of right there at the frontier of the business sort of fixing things and solving things.
Elliot Moss
So I get all that, right.
David Benigson
Yeah.
Elliot Moss
I buy all that.
David Benigson
Yes.
Elliot Moss
The bit, the bit though how that’s impacting you.
David Benigson
Yes.
Elliot Moss
You’re a young dad…
David Benigson
Yes.
Elliot Moss
…literally one year old boy, congratulations.
David Benigson
Thank you.
Elliot Moss
The best is yet to come. Um, 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, how are you processing all of this stuff?
David Benigson
Well, I, I…
Elliot Moss
I’m sure you are the chief learning officer, I’m sure.
David Benigson
Yeah.
Elliot Moss
You’re going to deal with that because you’re a really smart guy.
David Benigson
Yeah.
Elliot Moss
But the emotional thing. How are you coping with that?
David Benigson
Well I, I wish I could say that you spend lots of, or I spend lots of time sort of reflecting on that and thinking about how I’m processing it but, you know, you, you just don’t have enough time, you know, one of the things, uh, I find myself being is, is just constantly forward looking. You know, what is the next thing, what is the next challenge, what is the next opportunity, um, and you have even less time, uh, now that I have a one year old so, you know, balancing those two things, uh, whilst having a very sort of demanding but inspiring job pretty much fills the time allotted pretty well.
Elliot Moss
But do you try and make space?
David Benigson
You just don’t really have that opportunity to, 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 and…
Elliot Moss
He looks excited by the way.
David Benigson
…and in a world that is just moving so fast right now in, in my world with, with new technology, new innovation, new opportunity almost happening every week, you sort of have to just be fixated on, on what’s coming next and you don’t tend to spend much time, uh, looking backwards frankly.
Elliot Moss
He’s now reflecting, as I’m looking at him, 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 from my Business Shaper, it’s David Benigson. He’s the Founder of Signal AI, along with some other clever people, um, 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. Mishcon de Reya’s Ashleigh Williams and Michael Rose, a senior associate at DRD Partnership discuss how companies can navigate their own AI strategy.
You can enjoy all our former Business Shapers on the Jazz Shapers podcast, and you can hear this very programme again if you pop ‘Jazz Shapers’ into your favourite podcast platform. My guest today for a special Encore edition of Jazz Shapers, is David Benigson, Co-Founder and CEO of Signal AI, a reputation and risk intelligence company. I mentioned at the beginning also, 800 companies, um, huge scale now. The product itself and I, and I, 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?
David Benigson
Yeah we, we spend a lot of time speaking to our customers and, and asking them what their biggest challenges are. When we last spoke, uh, on this show 5 years ago, I mean think about just how much is, has changed, how much volatility, um, how many issues, you know, big organisations have had to, to grapple with since then. 5 years ago it was all about Covid. Prior to that it was Brexit. Now we’ve got geopolitical issues, supply chain issues, you know, 3 years ago all of our clients were obsessing about DNI, now no one wants to speak about DNI, um, organisations 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 pre-emptive and predictive. A big part of our focus right now is, uh, organisations typically get to the issue when it’s already materialised and they all want to get to the issue ahead of time in a more predictive way. And so that drives a lot of our road map 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, you know, that’s how…
Elliot Moss
It’s the path.
David Benigson
…drive, drives our focus.
Elliot Moss
And of course the more, 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 moral, you know, the ethics of AI. How does that manifest itself in your business?
David Benigson
Well it’s one of our key differentiators I think in world where, um, AI is becoming more available than ubiquitous, you know, what, what differentiates an organisation 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 were delivering to that, to that end client is being sourced in the right and appropriate way.
Elliot Moss
And do you do that in real time David?
David Benigson
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, uh, they know that there is a quality and accuracy threshold that we have built into our platform over 10 years. You know, trained and evolved through our client’s feedback that ensure that when we send out rag rapport, when we send a red alert to someone senior at a board level or a C level executive, they are going to open that rapport and they’re going to know that it’s not a false positive, that it’s something that they really should pay attention to, uh, and take heed of.
Elliot Moss
Do you get it wrong though? Does it, is it wrong sometimes?
David Benigson
Of course, yeah, no.
Elliot Moss
And then what, what’s the way you deal with that? Does that actually improve the product next time?
David Benigson
Exactly. So then we, you know, feed that back in and we’ve got the benefit of, you know, a decade’s worth of feedback from customers and from our own teams and analysts who are then re-training our models and re-inputting back into our engine and our system. But…
Elliot Moss
As you were talking I’m just thinking about like it’s you’re creating a new machine which many businesses are having to do. Is that how you see it. Do you see it as a sort of I’m David in charge of a factory. I don’t know what the factory looks like but I’ve got to alive these outputs over here with different processes and different systems and, and then technology which enables you to actually see things as I’ve just mentioned, in real time. That is sort of invention isn’t it?
David Benigson
Yeah, yeah absolutely. I mean ultimately what AI is, is enabling us to do on a whole number of different levels is, 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 digitised. 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 and we are compressing that into something that can be digitised 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, you know, when you think about that ability to compress a process like that, the opportunities and the outputs can be really profound.
Elliot 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 seeing as you’re in it?
David Benigson
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, and I have been thinking deeply about, you know, what, what are the skills or the types of education that I want my own child to go through in a world that is, um, changing so, so rapidly around us. And initially, you know, we, 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. Um, 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. And that is, you know, incredible but it is, um, lowering the barrier to entry dramatically. So, so my view actually has changed to being much more focussed on what are the unique human capabilities and skills that we can dial up in, in our next generation. It’s actually those skills around intuition and, and critical thinking and creativity, um, and human relationships. Those are the things that are unscrapable, um, and, and that AI is going to continue to struggle to be able to automate, uh, to the quality and to, to the level that we can achieve and so, bizarrely now, I, I would rather have my kids, you know, focus on humanities perhaps than I would on some of those stem basics.
Elliot Moss
He’s only one though so don’t do that yet, it might be a little, a little fast. But, um…
David Benigson
Right now it’s lots of nursery rhymes.
Elliot Moss
Yeah I’m sure, I’m sure. But the, and also the other thing is, you’re, you were never a technologist, you may love technology like me, I love technology but you’re, you’re background you did, you did a post-graduate law, law school didn’t you?
David Benigson
Exactly.
Elliot Moss
I mean, you did all that.
David Benigson
Exactly.
Elliot Moss
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?
David Benigson
Agreed, agreed but, but I always looked with huge admiration at both my co-founders and then the technical people in my organisation who really were the sort of the key, the, the secret source to actually make whatever we were dreaming up...
Elliot Moss
You can’t do it without them.
David Benigson
…come to fruition. What’s interesting now is, is those functions are converging and the lines are getting more and more blurred between what is a, you know, a product strategist, what is an engineering manager, what is an AI researcher, what is a, you know, someone who understands the business problem and the, 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, you know, the opportunities are tremendous. All of us can pick up, you know, Claude or ChatGPT today and start writing code. We do not need, you know, that background or that expertise and so the flood gates are opening to even more innovation I think and opportunity.
Elliot Moss
Stay with me for my final chat with David Benigson and we’ve got some music from GoGo Penguin, that’s all coming up in just a moment, don’t go anywhere.
David Benigson is my Business Shaper. He’s here, back after 5 years. He said, yes, I’ll do it if you really want me to and you did, thank you, I appreciate that. So this, 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 there’s, they’ve bought something that they really believe, Battery Ventures I think have invested in you and become majority shareholders. That is, um, 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?
David Benigson
No, no, no of course it’s, it’s a huge responsibility and it’s a sort of huge vote of confidence, uh, from them, um, and I think with that responsibility comes, you know, significant expectation but I think we’ve always had tremendous ambition for what the business could do and, you know, people ask me, gosh after sort of 10/11 years, you know, are you tired, you know, are you worn out and actually in many ways I feel like I’ve just literally gone and started.
Elliot Moss
He’s horizontal here by the way. We gave him a pillow. He’s having a quick lie down and a time to reflect, it’s the first time.
David Benigson
Yeah, a cable lie down but that’s, that’s probably more the one year old than the, than the business demands. But, but I think, you know, we feel like we, 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, uh, and expertise that we’ve, we’ve created and the platform and technology that we’ve developed, that is now giving us the platform to actually go and realise, uh, our ambition and so the, the capital, uh, and the partnership with Battery Ventures who, who I’m very pleased are a, you know, they’re a US founded fund but they are 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, uh, what we’re doing and, and grow the number of customers that we work with and help more organisations sort of navigate these, these complex times. So yes it’s, there is a lot of responsibility there, uh, but I think it’s just more fuel to help us sort of realise the vision that we have.
Elliot 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?
David Benigson
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 a 165 million dollars sort of out of the blue. We, you know, we’ve been building this business, you know, 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, um, in order to demonstrate that you are ready for, for that next step and, you know, the process Battery Ventures put us through, credit to them, was, was rigorous and, and demanding and by the end of that process I’m pretty sure, you know, they understood and knew the business almost as well as I did or, or we did. Um, and I think that that, you know, that meeting of minds, that, you know, realisation and alignment between us of the opportunity in front of us is then what has given them the conviction to back us. So extremely excited by that partnership, um, the expertise that they can help bring to the business, um, and what this means for us moving forward.
Elliot Moss
And then last question before I ask you about your song choice. If you look forwards, obviously we met 5 years ago and often people talk about and my own business, we talk about 5 year plans, 2030 visions, countries do the same. It feels like 2030 in the world of AI is almost too far. So what is your trajectory time wise and if it was 3 years versus 5 years, what does your business look like then?
David Benigson
Yeah I think it is incredibly difficult to cast your mind forward right now because everything is, is moving so quickly and it is almost every week that a new innovation or a new disruption is, is happening in our space. You know, I, I go back to the core customer problem that we’re trying to solve and ultimately that’s what we sort of obsess in and get fixated on and, and really what I’m trying to compress at Signal AI, what we’re trying to get better and better and better at is predicting the next risk or reputational issue well in advance of, of it occurring and materialising for one of our clients. And so if I think 3 or 4 or 5 years forward, I don’t so much think about features and functionality or dashboards or visualisations. I think about giving the most senior person we have access to in big global organisations the answer, the signal in its sort of purest and cleanest form that there is something that they need to look at and there is something they might need to mitigate and that could be a supply chain issue, a cyber issue, a reputational issue, um, you know, an ESG issue, a DNI issue but the faster and more predictive we can get in providing those signals, the more value we create and we want to just get better and better and better at that. And so that’s what we are going to obsess about.
Elliot Moss
Simple focus.
David Benigson
Yeah.
Elliot Moss
And the factory will be whatever the factory needs to be to delivery that?
David Benigson
Exactly.
Elliot Moss
Brilliant, thank you so much David.
David Benigson
Thank you.
Elliot Moss
Just before I let you go off and invent the future as you seem to be doing. What’s your song choice and why have you chosen it?
David Benigson
So I’ve chosen Louis Prima, Buona Sera, and, uh, this is a song that I’ve been playing a lot to my one year old and, uh, I think, you know, he’s just a lot of fun, obviously first heard him in the jungle book and so brought me back to my childhood and so, you know, I want to have good, happy music around my, my, uh, new boy so that’s my choice.
Elliot Moss
Louis Prima with Buona Sera, the song choice of my Business Shaper today, David Benigson. He talked about the importance of intuition and creativity in the context of an increasingly AI driven world and how important it will be for our children and young people to focus on that. He talked about the responsibility of the investment he’s just received as a fuel to realise the plans and their ambitions as a business which I loved in the way he contextualised that. And finally, a laser sharp focus on what is the business about. No distractions regarding features and technology in the world around but what is Signal going to be delivering in the next few years. A really excellent lesson. Don’t lose sight of what the business is about. That’s it from me and Jazz Shapers, have a lovely weekend.
We hope you enjoyed that edition of Jazz Shapers. You’ll find hundreds of more guests available for you to listen to in our archive. To find out more just search ‘Jazz Shapers’ in iTunes or your favourite podcast platform or head over to mishcon.com/jazzshapers.