Marketing and Business Intelligence vendor Data Axle unveiled Audience360, its suite of data management capabilities that consist of front-end data capture, data management, and data distribution. Enterprise data is ingested via APIs or FTP and then processed through a suite of cleansing, standardization, enrichment, identity resolution, and deduplication modules.
DMP: LiveRamp, Lotame, TradeDesk, Oracle Data Cloud, and half a dozen other programmatic platforms. Data Axle supports nearly one billion hashed emails to assist with targeting.
BI platforms: Adobe, HCL Unica, Alterian
“A lot of people struggle with the rigidity of some of the tools that are out there,” explained Data Axle SVP of Client Technology Solutions Sal Pecoraro. “People think that when they buy a marketing cloud platform, it does all the data hygiene work.”
Audience360 lets data analysts and operations teams “design data capture, data management processing, and distribution into the system that they need,” continued Pecoraro. It doesn’t matter whether the platforms are on-premise or hosted in the marketing cloud or S3 buckets on Amazon.
Pecoraro emphasized data security with encryption both in transport and at rest. “If they need to anonymize data, we can match IDs, etc. So, if there are security concerns about exporting their data to us, we can handle that through encryption and anonymization.”
He also positioned the solution as more flexible, quick to implement, and less expensive than other solutions, with a strong ROI. Platform flexibility is “the most important thing, with support that goes beyond CDPs. Furthermore, alternative platforms are expensive, ”large investments.” This “rigidity” and high cost make it difficult to define a strong ROI and use case.
Conversely, “ours is much less expensive, quicker to stand up, more flexible to have those components that you need added. You can add or remove things over time. It’s not a black box or rigid solution that you can adjust as your business changes. But I think flexibility [and] speed to market is some of our core value.”
And because the platform is service-based, companies don’t need to worry about training, upgrading the platform, or managing bug patches. “We take requirements, we do configurations, we build automations, and we plug in on data receipt and export.”
Due to the system’s flexibility, pricing is bespoke based on volume, processes, and integrations. Pricing is generated by the requirements gathering team, and implementation is passed to a design and implementation team. Later, ownership is managed by a post-implementation support team.
Audience360 offers an “iterative process” that lets clients add or remove processes, data sources, and integrations.
As Data Axle offers three datasets, a broad set of linkages are supported, including households, corporate families, business/consumer, and employment.
Audience360 is generally available.
Clients include multiple healthcare companies and a large telco. The service also supports retailers, financial services, and travel/leisure.
B2B Data and Intelligence vendor LeadGenius announced its expansion into the APAC region with “substantial” coverage of Japan, South Korea, Australia, and India. The firm also touts “emerging” coverage of China, Vietnam, and Uzbekistan. Simultaneously, the firm announced its new LeadGenius Plays and Rapid Enrich offerings.
“By leveraging top-performing campaigns from exceptional marketers, we help businesses launch complex data requests in seconds,” said VP of Sales and Customer Success Zeb Couch. “We are continuing to work with our clients around the world to build global B2B data aimed at increasing growth through custom signals and account insights. With over 80% of B2B data undiscovered or underutilized, we want to give our clients every tool possible for targeting and differentiation.”
LeadGenius Plays simplifies custom data campaigns and look-a-like audiences based on non-standard data characteristics. Plays also enriches files and appends missing fields.
LeadGenius employs artificial intelligence, robotic process automation (RPA), human intelligence, and curation when collecting its data.
LeadGenius Campaign Plays
LeadGenius also announced its Rapid Enrich real-time DaaS product this week, with coverage of enterprise, SMB, and global data.
“In the fast-paced world of B2B data, the need for a solution that offers agility, precision, and comprehensive insights was evident,” stated LeadGenius CEO Mark Godley. “With the unveiling of Rapid Enrich, we are setting a new standard for data enrichment technology, enabling our clients to stay ahead in an increasingly competitive landscape. We are thrilled to introduce Rapid Enrich as our latest innovation in providing agile, comprehensive, and industry-leading data solutions. Our relentless pursuit of excellence and commitment to our clients’ success remains our guiding principles as we continuously push the boundaries of what’s possible in the B2B data sector.”
LeadGenius emphasized its data security and privacy management. Rapid Enrich includes “contractual assurances of responsible data handling, coupled with transparent audit trails that enable businesses to maintain an unquestionable record of their data management activities.”
Rhetorik began as a European technographics vendor but now focuses on broader company and contact intelligence.
B2B Data vendor Rhetorik announced Neuron360, its “AI-enhanced data platform designed to extend and enrich clients’ data-driven solutions, marketing strategies, and talent initiatives.” AI capabilities include language translation, data normalization, and contact-level lead targeting.
Neuron360 “unifies and integrates” its B2B intelligence, which spans 200 million company profiles, 800 million professional people profiles, and 60 million verified and compliant contact records (e.g., GDPR, CCPA, UK DMA). Rhetorik also supports international technographics at both the enterprise and worksite levels.
The Professional profiles contain over eighty data fields, including career history, skills, job titles (translated, normalized, and standardized), experiences, and education. Verified contacts doubles the field count to 160 fields and includes validated email, job title, job function, switchboard and direct phone numbers, employer, and business location.
“The process of taking a profile and converting it to a verified and compliance contact involves a number of steps, including applying our proprietary, AI-driven ‘still in position’ and ‘still in business’ tests, validation tests for job title, company, email, and other details, and the sending of ‘fair processing’ notices,” explained CRO Kevin Savage to GZ Consulting.
While approximately one in four verified contact is a technology title, “the vast majority of the contacts, no matter which functional department they sit in, are technology decision-makers, influencers or users – all of whom have a role in the tech buying process these days,” continued Savage.
Contact information is translated, normalized, and standardized for 46 languages across 164 countries.
Savage emphasized that the “60M contacts are not really the main part of the announcement. The news is that we now have these datasets all in one place, and we have 800M profiles that can be converted into verified and compliant contacts on request.”
Company profiles include over 150 data fields. Along with standard firmographics, Neuron360 includes social handles, location-level sizing data, and location-level technographics. Neuron360 company coverage is global, with 70 million EMEA, 50 million North American, 45 million APAC, and 30 million LATAM profiles.
“With Neuron360, we have combined the power of advanced AI tools with extensive data coverage, empowering our clients to harness the full potential of their data initiatives and fuel their marketing, sales, and talent initiatives with confidence,” said Rhetorik CEO Meredith Amdur. “Neuron360 brings all the global B2B data needs together in one place with precision, quality, freshness, and breadth. Our exacting data buyers can choose from a comprehensive suite of data APIs, firehose feeds, online portals, and batch delivery.”
Neuron360 includes a query builder with counts and summarized firmographics presented in both tabular and visual formats. The query builder also displays the search query in multiple languages, including Python, Node.js, Ruby, Php http v1, and C. Developers can then copy / paste the query into Postman or other API platforms.
Additional tools include usage tracking and a status page for checking platform uptime. Documentation includes a data dictionary, schema, field population counts, internal and external values, and summary data (e.g., counts by country, revenue range, etc.)
B2B DaaS vendor SalesIntel shifted away from credit-based data pricing to unlimited data access to its firmographics, technographics, contacts (including emails and direct dials), and news alert intelligence. Pricing is based on the number of users, with unlimited access to downloads, exports, and data enrichment.
”SalesIntel’s unlimited everything plan removes the friction, frustration, and predatory pricing so many customers experience when working with other B2B data providers.” comments SalesIntel CEO Manoj Ramnani. “We are proud to be a true partner to this industry by leading a pricing revolution that will help go-to-market teams build limitless pipeline.”
SalesIntel’s unlimited content includes:
300 million unique technology installs across 22 million accounts. Technographics span 18,000 technologies.
100 million email-verified contacts. Of these, over 17 million are maintained by SalesIntel editors and regularly reverified to maintain a 95% accuracy level.
B2B account news and alerts for 22 million companies organized into 32 categories.
Contracts include the RevDriver Chrome extension, Bombora intent data, and platform integrations (e.g., Salesforce, Dynamics 365, HubSpot, Outreach, Salesloft, Marketo).
Licenses also include access to SalesIntel’s Research-on-Demand editors for finding new contacts or reverifying contact information. Research on Demand is subject to credits, but at 120 per seat, the cap is generous.
SalesIntel has simplified pricing based on the number of seats.
Under credit-based pricing models, “Marketing is worried about not having enough credits for campaigns, Sales is worried about not having enough credits to effectively prospect, and RevOps is worried that there won’t be enough credits to keep all this data clean.”
Removing credit-based pricing offers several benefits to customers:
Budgeting is simplified as the total cost of a SalesIntel contract is known when the contract is signed. RevTech teams do not need to create mid-year POs if credits are running low or additional marketing campaigns are planned.
RevOps does not need to allocate and monitor credits across multiple teams or reallocate a dwindling set of credits at the end of the year.
Marketing can run enrichment, including visitor enrichment, and updates as frequently as they’d like, limiting the impact of data decay on their account, contact, and lead data.
Marketing can regularly analyze and expand its ICP and test new verticals without worrying about credits.
Sales Reps can research and sync key contacts to their SEP or CRM without worrying about using up their allotted credits halfway through the year.
Furthermore, SalesIntel does not include any “data destroy” clauses, a legal issue that some incumbent vendors employ to increase the cost to defectors.
CMO James Lamberti explained to GZ Consulting that credit-based pricing “becomes a barrier to value for the customer,” with customers feeling “trapped” by usage limits. “We want people to begin to appreciate the full depth and breadth of our data and to leverage it in ways to make themselves more efficient.”
Ramnani argued that SalesIntel customers enjoy value via “three very simple steps:
We help them identify their ICP using the intelligence from our firmographic and technographic data.
Then, we apply the intelligence of news and intent data to see who from their ICP is in the market today.
Within those in-market companies, our customers enjoy direct conversations using mobile phones and direct dials.”
However, “context is everything.” Vendors that provide large contact sets without the context of an ICP, account news, and intent data (i.e., steps 1 and 2) are providing names and numbers but fostering inefficiency in their go-to-market. Targeting is more than simply finding many names. Revenue teams need to know whom to call, when to call, and what to say.
SalesIntel can offer unlimited data access because it owns all of its data except for Bombora’s intent file.
Historically, Sales Intelligence services offered seat-based pricing, and marketing data vendors provided volume-based pricing. When services began serving both departments, credit-based models were crafted on top of seat-based pricing, creating complex and frustrating pricing. SalesIntel is looking to return to simple pricing and “partner with the industry” based on “the value of our data and the quality of our software,” argued Lamberti.
Lamberti described the sweet spot for this model as the mid-market – firms between 40 and 50 employees and several hundred. These firms have some maturity in their marketing stack and go-to-market motion, with multiple BDRs and sellers.
However, “if you’re just a ten-person team with one seller and one BDR, we’ll certainly do business. We’re going to have a package for them. But the unlimited package is really so that we can go after the market where we really are a great fit, where we win.”
“Strategically, we know that this is the time to strike. We’re not VC-backed. This is where Manoj has got the right [employee-shareholder] strategy,” argued Lamberti. The firm is not subject to the financial pressure of outside equity investors or public markets. Thus, the new pricing is designed strategically “to gain share and grow our market footprint dramatically.” SalesIntel contracts are annual with multi-year discounts. Pricing starts at around $11,000, with additional seats priced at $1,200. Current customers that renew early can convert to the new pricing structure.
B2B DaaS vendor Live Data Technologies closed on a $5 million Series A led by Entrada Ventures with “further participation from firms and individuals with deep backgrounds in data tech.” Previously, the firm was funded from revenue, but “we raised this round when we saw the opportunities made possible by overwhelming investor interest and support.”
“We have been behind Live Data Technologies since the company’s inception,” said Entrada Ventures Managing Partner and Live Data Technologies Board Member Jason Spievak. “The core technology has multiple compelling applications across industries and verticals. The accuracy and quality of job change event detection are mission critical to anyone making informed decisions.”
Live Data focuses on contact changes and ensuring accurate contacts in the CRM. It maintains data on 70 million contacts and 2 million companies, capturing 30,000 daily job changes from the open web. Live Data argues that mining this intelligence from the web ensures more timely contacts than traditional data collection methods.
Contact data changes support:
Tracking champions as they move to new companies.
Highlighting account risk when champions or buying committee members depart.
Detecting promotions that create opportunities for success stories, upsell opportunities, and case studies.
“Each go-to-market strategy requires essential ingredients working together like a great recipe. But, even the most perfect strategy will fall short if the people you put your message in front of are no longer relevant, or you lack up-to-date contact records, to begin with,” blogged Director of Growth Jason Saltzman. “The bottom line is that business decision-making is done at the human level, and up-to-date contact-level data is essential for successful go-to-market programs.”
The firm will continue refining its DaaS offering and improving its data set and delivery. “Our Series A represents a confirmation that we are building something valuable,” said CEO J. Scott Hamilton. “We see it, our investors see it, and our customers see it. With all this recognition comes a pressure to take Live Data to the next level – and, in our eyes, pressure is a privilege.”
Nektar.AI supports automated activity capture and CRM sync across the full customer lifecycle.
After two years in stealth mode, Revenue Operations solution provider Nektar.AI was unveiled earlier this month. Nektar looks to solve the “CRM data leakage” problem whereby critical lead, contact, and opportunity data is omitted or decays. For example, Nektar recognizes meeting attendees missing from the CRM and automatically creates contact records that include email, direct dial phone, title, and buying committee role. Out-of-date or missing data negatively impacts both the sales process and operational functions such as analytics, automated recommendations, and pipeline forecasting.
Nektar offers a no-code platform that applies natural-language processing against email, calendar, chat, and social touchpoints, capturing revenue activity data across the full customer lifecycle and syncing it with the CRM. Automated activity capture improves rep productivity, allowing sales professionals to focus on selling instead of data entry and updating.
“Sales teams depend on their CRM data to gain insights into team productivity, pipeline insights, and revenue forecasting. Despite a CRM being an important system of record for modern go-to-market teams, it still grapples with the problem of poor user adoption and missing data. As per estimates, 40-50% of sales activity data remains missing from a CRM, while 27% of the data that’s available in a CRM decays every month. This leads to major data and productivity leakage,” stated the firm.
Furthermore, deals are becoming increasingly complex, with larger buying committees and sales teams communicating across an expanding array of sales channels. While most of these conversations are now digital, they take place across disparate platforms and channels, resulting in data fragmentation. Nektar’s mission is to collect this fragmented intelligence and feed it into the CRM, making it available to the revenue team without requiring sales resources to key this intelligence.
“There are a lot of reporting and analytics solutions out there. Other solutions have been investing primarily in the downstream problem with respect to visibility and analytics, an important problem to solve. But the core problem actually starts upstream, which is where activities are taking place and where data is being generated. A lot of that data doesn’t make its way into CRM, which actually results in downstream problems. If there’s poor data in, you will have poor insights available,” explained CEO Abhijeet Vijayvergiya to GZ Consulting.
“We found our product-market fit when we found that more than 50% of critical revenue activity data is not going into CRM,” continued Vijayvergiya. “This data leak results in productivity leaks, and that results in revenue leaks.”
Furthermore, as firms make staffing cuts, “they’re trying to do more with less” and losing implicit knowledge that never made its way into the CRM. Nektar allows companies to recover much of this lost activity and contact intelligence, boosting a firm’s ability to manage revenue operations during a recession.
“There are tools like Gong and Clari and some other forecasting solutions which provide good insights,” expanded Vijayvergiya on Nektar’s value proposition. But these systems are not resolving the data leakage problem.
Nektar claims 95% accuracy in its data capture and syncing processes. The service can go live in ninety minutes and begins providing time to value in three days as it gathers both historical data missing from the CRM and populates it with ongoing activity capture.
Nektar operates in the background, collecting and syncing data. Thus, there are no training sessions or additional UIs to learn. Sales reps do not need to toggle to other platforms, and their data entry work is significantly reduced.
“Nektar plugs the CRM data leakage without a user lifting their finger. We basically eliminate the need for user adoption and give all the time back to salespeople to go and sell while relieving their administrative burden,” said Vijayvergiya.
While there have been third-party solutions to populate and enrich account and contact data records for over a decade (e.g., Dun & Bradstreet, ZoomInfo), these vendors were blind to the demand unit unless a sales rep entered all members. Nektar is complementary to third-party DaaS providers, Revenue Intelligence vendors (e.g., Clari, Revenue Grid), Conversational Sales (e.g., Gong, Chorus), and business intelligence vendors (e.g., Tableau).
“We are aware that some of these solutions have their own activity capture system, but most of their activity capture solutions work in silos for certain sets of users who adopt their solution,” continued Vijayvergiya. “Users are not adopting the solution, or data loss happens anyway. A solution which we replace, more often than not, is Salesforce Einstein Activity Capture.”
Nektar supports email and domain exclusion lists to prevent mining confidential information (e.g., legal, investor relations, partner development).
Nektar is generally available as a native Salesforce solution, with HubSpot and Microsoft Dynamics on the roadmap. In addition, all of its system integrations are native, providing higher quality and performance.
Nektar.AI closed a $6 million seed round last summer, raising its total funding to $8.1 million. The round was led by B Capital Group, with Nexus Venture Partners, 3One4 Capital, and angel investors also joining.
Nektar has not disclosed pricing, but it is per user per month with SaaS-based pricing billed quarterly or annually.
Nektar is a fully remote company with 32 employees across seven countries with plans to hit fifty employees by the end of this year. Although emerging from stealth, it already supports over 1,500 users.
Nektar’s goal through year-end is to focus on its go-to-market strategy and North American hiring.
Nektar activity tracking at the account level
Data capture as an AI tool is becoming increasingly important. It probably isn’t a standalone offering but an underlying capability for populating the CRM with harvested digital intelligence, monitoring buyer engagement, and building out the buying committee. As such, it is core to both CRM data enrichment and revenue intelligence.
I have seen a series of data capture announcements from vendors of all sizes: big (Microsoft Viva Sales), medium (People.AI, Introhive), and small (e.g., Nektar, Winn.AI). I also covered People.AI and Winn.AI this week.
Yesterday, I posted about Vainu’s new Global Database. The firm also announced its Vainu for HubSpot connector for matching and enriching company data against its global reference database.
“Most sales and marketing teams want to be data-driven. They want to run ABM campaigns, apply modern lead scoring models, and automate many parts of the sales process. SalesOps and Marketing Ops professionals are there to facilitate all that, but there’s one common challenge they’re facing: CRM data is messy and outdated,” observed Vainu co-founder Mikko Honkanen. “With that struggle in mind, we thought it would be a good time to launch a new HubSpot connector at the same time that we’re launching Vainu Global…so that it’s easy for companies using HubSpot to get their CRM data cleaned, updated, and enriched.”
As companies are being matched against Vainu’s new global database, not registered Nordic filings, the match field is URLs, not business IDs or VATs. With forms, contacts are matched against email domains. If a company is not already in HubSpot, new Accounts are created, and the Contacts are associated with the new record.
“This means it works very well with HubSpot CRM, because domain is often the company property that a business will have for almost all of the company records they have in their CRM, which means that it’ll be easier to match the companies in HubSpot to our database,” contended Honkanen.
During beta testing, match rates were as high as 99%. For non-matched records, the firm offers on-demand matching against missing domains. If they are valid domains, Vainu adds profiles to its company directory.
Along with standard firmographics, account enrichment includes Vainu’s Custom Industry segments, global web traffic ranking, and Vainu segments (e.g., website keywords or phrases). Profiles generally have four to eight industry labels, helping with targeting.
Other fields include technographics and domain redirect information. Redirects are often implemented after acquisitions or rebrands and are useful for assigning contacts.
Vainu for HubSpot Send to CRM
Vainu offers a field mapper for assigning Vainu data to HubSpot and setting update rules. For example, admins can set field update logic to always update, update if null, or never update. Vainu custom fields that are not in HubSpot are automatically created. Along with companies, admins can map contacts, tasks, notes, and deals.
Thus, admins can build a campaign and upload it to HubSpot with task assignments. The inclusion of tasks and notes helps specify campaign details, such as recommended collateral and case studies, with the Vainu Custom Industry and Technology Intelligence assisting with messaging.
If companies do not exist in HubSpot, Account records are created. If they exist, then the existing records are enriched.
By default, HubSpot does not overwrite current account owners.
Updates can be performed on a scheduled basis or executed as a one-time batch operation.
Vainu intelligence with tasks and notes displayed in HubSpot.
Matchbook AI, which offers External Data and Data Hygiene solutions to enterprise clients, has announced a $3 million seed extension. It previously received $1.7 million in seed and friends and family funding.
Matchbook was founded in 2018 but operated as a garage project for a couple of years before being incorporated. CEO Rushabh Mehta had the idea for the Matchbook Data Hub while an industry evangelist and initially built the solution with Dun & Bradstreet data. The Data Hub provides a configurable, hierarchical matching service that matches and enriches records with a single API call. Both batch and real-time matching are supported, with cascading and waterfall matching processes. In addition, a rules engine allows customers to construct bespoke data cleansing and filtering rules specific to various business units and use cases. The Data Hub will be powered by Snowflake.
The system can use other identifiers such as domains or emails if the account cannot be matched by name and address. In addition, the system manages deduplication and prevents creating duplicate records when onboarding accounts. The solution can also support more complex matching scenarios to allow for verification checks and multi-attribute matching.
“I can immediately see if I already have an existing relationship with that account,” Mehta explained to GZ Consulting. “Just because I keyed in the name incorrectly or a previous account had a different address for that same company, I should still be able to identify and say, ‘Hey, no, it’s the same company to the same account.’”
The Data Hub also manages information for enterprise clients with multiple CRMs, helping “provide that visibility across CRMs, across ERPs, or CRM and ERP.” Thus, Matchbook can identify whether “there is already an existing relationship within the organization with that particular entity” through third-party identification. Furthermore, matching identifies parent-sub relationships tied together by D-U-N-S numbers.
According to Mehta, customers want controlled updates to their CRM or ERP, not real-time updates. They also want to control which fields are updated with the data hub keeping “everything mastered in one place” with the intelligence accessible to the organization.
Matchbook AI’s data partners and supported platforms
Along with Dun & Bradstreet’s data sets (e.g., companies, contacts, hierarchies, beneficial ownership, D-U-N-S identifiers, technographics, competitors, company news, and credit and supplier risk profiles), Matchbook AI provides third-party reference data from ZoomInfo, Demandbase, Moody’s, Experian, Melissa, and Google. The service also includes sanctions and terrorist watchlist data for compliance use cases.
The Data Hub operates as a centralized external data repository for maintaining data quality and standardizing data across platforms, including Salesforce, Snowflake, SAP, Informatica, Microsoft, Oracle, Certa, and Reltio. The Data Hub supports a broad set of processes and departments, with sales, marketing, finance, IT, logistics, compliance, legal, and supplier management use cases. It also plays a critical role in MDM use cases through integrations with Reltio and others.
Matchbook claims implementations between two days and two months, significantly faster than its competitors. Furthermore, as a DaaS solution, it is 90% less expensive than in-house solutions. It also claims a 75% savings on expenses related to maintaining a data stewardship team due to “improved data quality and automated management.”
VP of Sales & Marketing Wesley Billingslea described a recent dinner with a Fortune 500 CIO who described Matchbook AI as “quite strategic and pervasive because we go across departments,” whereas “most MDM projects sit in the IT organization.” This approach “empowers” teams across the organization with superior data and a plug-and-play solution.
Matchbook focuses on enterprise clients, with 59% of its customers in the Fortune 500. It takes a land-and-expand approach that proves itself in one department or on one platform and then extends to others. Contracts are usually written for a single year and then converted to multi-year contracts a year later. The strategy has resulted in a 118% net retention rate and a projected ARR increase of 220% this year.
“As we gear up our sales and marketing efforts, we are confident that we will soon achieve $3.5 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) with Current ARR of $1.85 million,” said Mehta. “Data should be trusted, enriched, and always ready. I feel very confident in our approach as we take these next steps and help companies understand their data DNA in this age of intelligent business.”
Matchbook claims an impressive LTV/CAC ratio greater than 12, an important indicator of stickiness, value, and an efficient go-to-market approach.
Mehta noted that it is just entering a large market with a rapidly expanding TAM. According to MarketsandMarkets, data cleansing and global master data management were an $11.3 billion market in 2020, growing to $27.9 billion by 2025 (19.8% CAGR).
“Our value proposition to an MDM implementation can mean the difference between success and failure,” said Mehta.
Pricing is based on a records-under-management model, providing a predictable budget line to companies. Implementations range from 50,000 to 100 million records. Matchbook has grown to 51 employees in the Americas and Asia. The bulk of its R&D is conducted in Asia.
Growth equity firm Great Hill Partners invested €180 million in Echobot and Leadfeeder, merging the firms into a Sales Intelligence and Go-to-market platform. Both firms are based in Europe (Germany and Finland) and will benefit from the roadmap set out by North American RevTech firms.
The merged firm will be based in Karlsruhe, Germany, with Echobot CEO Bastian Karweg continuing as CEO. Leadfeeder CEO Pekka Koskinen will become the CPO. The combined company has a headcount of 250 across six offices in Europe and the US. The new firm’s Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) exceeds €20 million.
Leadfeeder serves around 7,000 customers and Echobot 1,500.
Echobot’s European data coverage
Echobot offers a Sales Intelligence and B2B DaaS platform for the D-A-CH region, UK, and France. Late last year, it added a broader European data pack. It supports a database of 20 million European companies and over 60 million GDPR-compliant contacts. Company and contact data is derived from both registered filings and open web sources and includes directors, shareholders, and financials.
Echobot takes a “True Compliance” approach which gathers data only from publicly accessible sources. Furthermore, it provides verification links to the source URLs that allow reps to answer the question, “where did my data come from?” All data is hosted in Germany.
Echobot’s products include TARGET (prospecting), CONNECT (Sales Intelligence), DATACARE (B2B DaaS), and an API. In addition, Echobot offers CRM integrations with HubSpot, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, and SugarCRM.
“It is our goal to be the leading sales intelligence and go-to-market platform to our core European and North American markets,” said Karweg. “Thanks to Great Hill, we have now assembled the best data, AI / ML, talent, and operating experience to achieve just that. We are increasingly seeing organizations looking to take advantage of their own data and third-party data, and then to augment this intelligence with better, more personalized outreach. The combination of Echobot and Leadfeeder is uniquely positioned to capitalize on a massive market opportunity at the early stages of adoption.”
Leadfeeder IP-to-Account Visitor Intelligence
Leadfeeder offers website visitor intelligence that maps IP addresses to company intelligence. During the pandemic, it worked to identify remote workers and map them to their employers, helping refine which companies are in-market. It also supports connectors for Google Analytics, chatbots, audience retargeting, major CRMs, Zapier, and Slack.
“Integrating Leadfeeder’s web visitor identification system with Echobot’s data and prospecting solutions creates a unique platform upon which we can both enable organizations to identify and engage high-intent prospects as well as introduce incremental applications that enhance B2B sales and marketing operations,” said Koskinen.
Karweg envisions an ABM workflow that begins with an ICP analysis that identifies net-new accounts. The ICP is then mapped against Leadfeeder’s visitor intelligence and Echobot’s firmographics and event triggers to identify high-value, in-market accounts for programmatic marketing. While programmatic campaigns are not yet supported, they are in development.
Great Hill Partners has also committed an additional €50 million toward future acquisitions. In an interview with GZ Consulting, Echobot CEO Bastian Karweg indicated that the €50M in dry powder would be used towards acquiring talent, RevTech functionality, or expanded content.
The equity acquisition is a combination of primary and secondary funding, with Great Hill Partners buying out many of the original investors. It named Growth Partner Derek Schoettle Chairman of the Board and placed Great Hill Partners Managing Director Chris Gaffney and Vice President Greg Stewart on the board of the merged organization.
Schoettle is also on the board of ABX Platform Terminus, another Great Hill investment. He was the CEO of ZoomInfo when DiscoverOrg acquired it in 2019 (DiscoverOrg subsequently assumed the name ZoomInfo), so he and the new board members offer deep Go-to-Market domain expertise.
“Go-to-market is one of the fastest-growing areas of B2B software. Sales and marketing organizations need timely, accurate information and intelligent systems to identify and engage their prospects in an increasingly personalized, automated fashion. By bringing together Echobot and Leadfeeder, we can create the next-generation sales intelligence and go-to-market platform,” stated Derek Schoettle.
The transaction is a merger of equals bringing together two firms of roughly the same revenue and employee base. Both firms have over €10M in ARR and are growing rapidly. Echobot grew 70% last year, while Leadfeeder had a 50% growth figure. Echobot has long been profitable, and Leadfeeder is nearing profitability.
The firms will initially run as independent brands as they merge their operations and platforms. The deal closed a few weeks ago but was announced this morning. Thus, they have already begun combining finance and HR. The two brands will be maintained in the near term with rebranding under consideration for 2023 as Echobot is also the name of a Mirai malware variant.
Valuation figures were not disclosed, but the final price was determined before the recent valuation declines and did not change. The firms were both being advised by GP Bullhound, which suggested that packaging the two firms together would result in a more effective growth equity round. Furthermore, the two companies offered features on each other’s roadmap so were logical complements.
Europe has been tracking behind the US in the Sales Intelligence space, with several national champions now looking to offer European datasets and local UIs. European sales intelligence and B2B DaaS solutions must meet higher data compliance and privacy standards, incorporate registered data from national registers, support multiple currencies, and many languages.
Echobot covers the D-A-CH region (Germany, Austria, and Switzerland), the UK, and France, with a general European data package added late last year. A Nordic data package has been accelerated due to the merger, which would increase its competitiveness against Dun & Bradstreet and Vainu.
“One of the most requested developments for 2021 was to access data from the entire European market. That was not only requested from German customers with a strong export to European countries, but also from new, international users that want to expand into Europe,” explained Karweg last November when Echobot added coverage of over twenty European countries.
“Europe is not one country but many, and there are differences between them, whether it’s to do with culture or data compliance,” remarked Schoettle. “Having a platform that is unique and linguistic-specific, and serving its markets with high-quality data, is a differentiator.”
“It’s a dream match,” argued Koskinen. While previously the firm purchased contact data from multiple sources, “it has been difficult to get sufficiently up-to-date and accurate data.” With the merger, Leadfeeder will offer better data quality and “have all the expertise in-house” to expand its coverage.
Along with higher quality data, Leedfeeder will benefit from a broader set of firmographics, financials, and sales triggers for data enrichment and lead scoring. Leadfeeder will also be able to cross-sell Echobot’s sales intelligence, prospecting, and data enrichment services to its 7,000 customers.
“We want to be the biggest in Europe,” stated Koskinen. “It’s going to take a few years, but I think we’re succeeding…We have long had customers all over the world. After the merger, we will be able to offer something that no one else can.”
Echobot offers German and English-language Sales Triggers.
Dun & Bradstreet announced its spring releases and enhancements at Forrester’s B2B Data conference in Austin. Dun & Bradstreet launched D&B Connect for Salesforce, its new data management service, and expanded D&B Rev.Up ABX functionality.
“With more accurate, actionable CRM data, businesses can make more confident decisions, identify more cross-sell and upsell opportunities, and target with greater precision,” blogged North American Sales & Marketing GM Stacy Greiner. “That’s the foundation for strong account-based strategies and digitalization. It’s the foundation for a stronger business, period.”
D&B Connect for Salesforce is the next generation of Salesforce hygiene products, superseding D&B Optimizer for Salesforce. Users have broader control over matching logic. They can employ easy matching based on Dun & Bradstreet Confidence Codes or customize the match logic by leveraging Confidence Codes alongside country/region selects and match quality.
The operations manager can set the importance of individual match grades by field (e.g., street number, name, etc.). Admins can also set match inclusion criteria, defining which fields should be excluded from matching (e.g., Non-Headquarter locations, Out-of-Business locations, Non-Marketable locations, or Undeliverable/Unreachable locations).
Connect for Salesforce has dramatically expanded the data sets available for enrichment, providing access to over 1,600 data elements based upon subscribed data blocks. Admins also have control over refresh frequency and rematch rules. Data may be refreshed every 14 days with the option of rematching unmatched records. Transactional matching is also supported, allowing real-time match and append for newly created records.
D&B Connect match logic administration
Other features include data health reports, field-level mapping, out-of-business flags, and duplicate management. In addition, Dun & Bradstreet offers 37 million subsidiary and branch linkages, ensuring proper territory management and lead assignment.
“What is preventing our marketing campaigns and sales plays from firing on all cylinders? asked Dun & Bradstreet Greiner. “Quite simply, bad data that is outdated, incorrect, duplicate, improperly formatted, or just outright missing. Let’s face it — we’re all to blame. We’re just not good about keeping our data up to date and refreshed. We don’t even do a good job entering the right data in the first place. This may be due in part to subjectivity, in part to laziness, and in part because there’s just not enough time in our day to be thorough enough.”
D&B Connect for Salesforce starts at $5,000 per company per year.
