Canopy Labs, a Y Combinator-incubated startup promising to help mid-sized businesses identify their most valuable customers, has raised $1.5 million in its first round of venture funding.
Co-founder and CEO Wojciech Gryc told me that following the completion of YC in August, the team decided to return to Toronto, and it raised money from “Canada-friendly” investors. The round was led by BDC Venture Capital IT Fund, with participation from Valar Ventures (which is backed by Peter Thiel) and various angels.
In addition to announcing funding, the company is also launching a free version of its self-serve product today. Canopy’s overall aim is to take the customer-modeling tools that large enterprises often build for themselves and offer a self-serve version that’s affordable for slightly smaller companies. Canopy takes existing customer data (such as emails, voicemails, and call-center recordings), then applies a statistical model to help businesses prioritize their most valuable customers or customize their marketing toward different segments. In an early campaign, the company reports that it increased sales conversions by 200 percent.
The free product includes customer segmentation, risk prediction (a prediction of how likely a company is to lose a given customer), and dashboards that aggregate the customer data that businesses upload. Gryc said he plans to launch “a fuller set of models and products in January 2013, and a more integrated analytics environment in mid-2013.”
The Canopy Labs team currently has four team members and plans to double in size over the next few months.
Canopy Labs provides a powerful platform for businesses wanting to build and apply customer models. We’ve built models for marketing campaigns, organized strategic plans, and have helped numerous companies better understand - and sell to - their audiences.
“BDC Venture Capital is a major venture capital investor in Canada, active at every stage of the company’s development cycle, from seed through expansion, with a focus on technology-based businesses that have high growth potential and that are positioned to become dominant players in their markets. BDC Venture Capital has been involved in venture capital since 1975 and has to date invested in more than 400 companies involved in the areas of Life Sciences, Telecommunications, Information Technology and Advanced Technologies.”...
Valar Ventures is an internationally-focused venture capital firm backed by Peter Thiel. Based in San Francisco, Valar invests exclusively in companies outside of the United States. Valar believes that over the next decade an increasing number of transformative technology companies will be started outside of the US, and that the founders of those companies will benefit from having a US partner that understands their unique challenges and opportunities and can help them access US networks.
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