French based predictive analytics company IKO System recently closed on a Series A funding round of 2.5 million euros to help speed up its European development.  Investors include Naxicap Partners, 3T Capital and Bpifrance.

The firm addresses two problems: generating qualified leads and automating meeting planning.  The Predictive Prospecting service begins at 12,000€ per year ($13,200) and provides unlimited lead scoring, lead engagement insights, and CRM/MAP integrations (Hubspot, Marketo, Salesforce, Pardot, and Oracle).  IKO System describes lead engagement insights as “Buying signals and context for each lead: competitors or complementary vendors in place, references to quote, key signals, email / tel / social.”

IKO System claims that its predictive analytics increase conversion rates by a factor of four to eight.

The Revenue Automation service bundles Predictive Prospecting with programmatic email campaigns, multi-user support, and engagement messaging consultations to “optimize lead response rates.”  Revenue Automation pricing was not disclosed.

The IKO database covers 9 million European companies and 30 million professional contacts.  Contacts, however, are focused on a few countries: the UK (8 million), France (7 million), Germany (3 million), and Benelux (3 million).

The firm gathers insights from 60,000 data sources including Bloomberg, Reuters, Zoominfo, LexisNexis, Experian, and DataMonitor.  Licensed content is married with monitored company websites.  IKO data is then matched against corporate datasets housed in CRM, marketing automation platforms, and other corporate assets.  IKO System constructs a lead scoring model for each company that includes firmographics, job position, data quality (e.g. fill rates on contact information), and buying signals.  IKO looks both at corporate level signals such as technology and product launches and “The lead’s buying signals for an offer similar to yours (public discussions, interviews, preliminary talks with your competitors).”

“Marketing teams contribute up to 40% of the leads needed by their sales force,” said IKO Systems CEO Marc Rouvier.  “At the same time, salespeople need to organize themselves to prospect and generate 60% of leads to hit their targets.  By putting IKO System in place, our clients give their sales teams a way of structuring and automating their prospection in order to generate 5 times more meetings.”

IKO has over 200 clients including Oracle, Adobe, Citrix, McAfee, HP, and TIBCO.