Another $10 million just went to Infer, a platform that tacks on
unstructured web data to proprietary customer data, using
predictive analysis to determine customer leads with the most
potential. The system can be integrated with popular sales and
marketing platforms Salesforce, Marketo and Eloqua. Infer's Series
A funding round followed three years of development, and was led by
Redpoint Ventures, and included Andreessen Horowitz, Social+Capital
Partnership, Sutter Hill Ventures, and angels. "Where are the
killer applications that leverage data science but don't require
you to be a data scientist to understand and run with?" asked Infer
CEO and co-founder Vik Singh in an introductory post on the company's blog this
week. Mr. Singh helped build the Yahoo BOSS open search platform
and recently sat in as Entrepreneur in Residence at Sutter Hill
Ventures.DataGravity, which has collected $42 million from venture capitalists in
the past year, aims to serve small and mid-tier companies, and
foster "a new wave in the consumerization of IT." The firm's future
clients don't have the luxury of hiring a data scientist, nor do
they have the budgets to afford the often expensive and
time-consuming consulting services and system integrations used by
the P&Gs and Walmarts of the world, suggested president and
co-founder John Joseph, who spoke with Ad Age after scoring a $30
million series B round of funding in January.AgilOne calls itself a
"data scientist in the cloud." The company grabbed $10 million in
Series B funding led by Mayfield Fund, and joined by Sequoia
Capital, in November. That brought its total funding to $16 million
since 2011. The firm's platform integrates marketer data and
analytics tools for clients such as PetCareRx and Sports
Authority.It's no secret that data scientists -- which tend to have
computer science and engineering, statistics, or mathematics
backgrounds -- are so hard to come by that their employers are in
constant fear of them getting poached by rivals. Tranzlogic
provides a platform featuring aggregated transactional shopper data
that is white labeled for end-use by merchants. The firm has yet to
receive VC funding, and CEO Charles Hogan seems OK with that. "We
probably get solicited twice a week," by VCs and investment
bankers, he said. "We're positioned as financial services with big
data and software-as-a-service combined, and then rapid scale, so
we kind of hit on all the sexy hot buttons."The "rapid scale" is
possible because the company distributes its platform through
credit card processors with lots of merchant clients. "I'm leery of
all VCs. I'm a true entrepreneur and I'm leery of all investors,"
Mr. Hogan said. Despite the frothiness, a data sector bubble is
probably a ways off. While there's no question marketers of all
sizes are moving towards employing more data analysis and related
tools in their work, there's a steep learning curve among many,
suggested Forrester senior analyst Rob Brosnan. The platforms
offered by the likes of AgilOne, DataGravity, SiSense and Infer,
will most likely appeal to small- and mid-tier marketers in part
because they're software platforms, not hardware systems requiring
additional staff. "It's very close to where an ordinary marketer
lives," he said.Brosnan said the amount of money flowing in from
VCs to data companies is in the hundreds of millions of
dollars.When working with older firms such as Oracle, SAP, IBM and others that offer data
services, marketers have "got to buy a ton of expensive hardware
from these guys," said Mr. Brosnan. Generally speaking, he added,
the more traditional hardware-based services "are not purpose-built
to your use case as a marketer."
Most smaller companies "probably are just not going to even want
to own hardware…or have the people or the time to build it,"
he said.
