Narrative Science raises $10 million to expand its auto-writing software

Narrative Science takes huge piles of numbers and makes summaries in the form of legible sentences and paragraphs. Until recently, it had focused that skill on generating newspaper articles based solely on box scores. But now it’s entered the stuffy realm of enterprise software, having been integrated with complicated IT architectures at financial services companies and government agencies. And that could be helpful for companies that no longer want to employ people to perform tedious analysis of data and share their findings with colleagues.

Most funding stories are more or less the same, which is why Re/code tries to avoid most of them: Company raises X amount of money, from Y companies, to do Z thing. Repeat. And that’s precisely the kind of thing that Narrative Science can now do without any humans at all: The Chicago-based company’s software can sift through big piles of data and automatically create stories on its own. Some of them you might encounter on the Web: Forbes, for instance, uses Narrative Science to create earnings previews and reports. But while Narrative Science originally got a lot of attention from journalists (like me) who wondered if it might replace journalists (like me), the bulk of the company’s work now comes from corporate customers, who use it to create internal reports for employees and customers.