AI startup Taiger liquidates Singapore entity, over 80 staff cut

Singapore

TAIGER, an artificial intelligence (AI) startup backed by government-owned SGInnovate and corporate investors, is shutting its Singapore headquarters and liquidating its local entity after racking up debts it cannot pay, according to a regulatory filing seen by The Business Times.

Over 80 employees from the Singapore office have been terminated due to the liquidation, Taiger said in response to queries from BT.

The company said it is offering assistance to affected staff looking for new roles. BT understands from sources that Taiger alumni have banded together to help axed employees with their job search.

Taiger Singapore had liabilities of S$9.8 million that exceeded assets of S$6.9 million, according to the company's audited financial statements for the year ended Dec 31, 2020. Operating cash outflow was S$6.8 million. CEO Sinuhe Arroyo said in a statement that the company had no outstanding bank debt.

The company's net loss deepened to S$12.5 million from S$9.4 million after flat revenue of S$3 million, and higher expenses for software development and staff.

Taiger works on AI products that use human-like logic to automatically read, understand and extract information from documents, which it says results in higher productivity and cost-savings for companies. It also offers an AI-powered search engine and virtual assistant.

It announced a fundraise of US$25 million in July 2019. The Series B round was led by PacificBridge Asset Management, an affiliate of TPG Capital, and MCM Investment Partners, a merchant bank and asset management firm headquartered in Hong Kong.

Singapore government-owned deep tech investor SGInnovate doubled down on its investment during the round.

Taiger was also one of 25 companies that received funding from the government's Special Situation Fund for Startups during the pandemic. The money was meant to help improve the startup's technology and drive market expansion in Asia, Europe and Latin America, government agencies said in a press statement last year. The Economic Development Board's investment arm EDBI made the investment.

Arroyo, who was born and raised in Spain, founded the company in 2009 as a semantic technology project based on research he had done during his computer science PhD studies in Austria.

Taiger tried expanding to the US in 2013 but exited the market after two years, according to an article on the company's website. It then moved to Singapore in 2015 and secured tenders from a number of government entities, the article said.

Taiger's global head of marketing, Joshua Kwah, cited difficulties in scaling the business while focusing on both highly customised AI solutions and platform-as-a-service offerings. The company will now focus on just building a platform it can charge users for, he said.

In its 2019 Series B announcement, Taiger said it had offices in Hong Kong, New York, Spain, Mexico and Dubai.

Only the Spain and Mexico operations are still live, according to Kwah. He said Taiger will focus its resources on developing its document analysis platform to "capture a ready market in Europe and Latin America".

Arroyo, along with chief technology officer Guillermo Infante and chief operating officer Stephen Watts, will remain in the Taiger group and be based in Singapore.

Taiger Singapore has appointed Alvarez & Marsal (SE Asia)'s Joshua James Taylor and Chew Ee Ling as provisional liquidators.

A creditors' meeting has been proposed to be held on April 29 to evaluate the list of creditors and estimated amounts of claims, regulatory filings showed.

-With assistance from Benjamin Cher and Sharanya Pillai

Garage is BT's startup vertical. Read more news, analyses and opinions at bt.sg/garage