InsideView Raises $19M For Service That Adds Intelligence Into CRM Systems

InsideView has raised $19 million for its platform that aggregates information and then adds it into a customer’s CRM installation. The round was led by Split Rock Partners, with participation from the company’s existing investors, Emergence Capital, Foundation Capital, and Rembrandt Venture Partners. Overall, InsideView has raised a total of $46.4 million.

The company aggregates 30,000 sources, such as Twitter, Facebook, Reuters, and SEC filings. It feeds this data through APIs into a company’s marketing or sales lead environment.

For example, InsideView for Marketing is used by customers to fill in data such as a contact’s title or other data that can be used to augment a lead profile. The data is presented within a customer’s CRM system and then fed into the underlying database. InsideView’s sales tool adds information that tells the sales person more about the prospect, the size of the customer and additional related insights.

The service takes into consideration the data models of various CRM platforms such as Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce.com, Sugar CRM and other major providers. The company integrates data through a platform that is based on natural language processing (NLP), employing open-source technologies such as Hadoop, relational databases and specialized libraries for NLP.

InsideView is a modern version of contact information systems that emerged before the advent of APIs and the ability to push data across different systems and process through NLP. They compete with major providers such as Harte-Hanks, whch has made a fortune in providing data to enhance marketing and sales contacts.

The new breed of competitors are data-driven providers that integrate their services deeply into business platforms. A number of factors make the difference with these platforms but it is mainly speed that matters most. Routing sales leads with the right information has a direct correlation to sales. It’s velocity that makes the difference,  if for nothing else than simply to get the job done and the sales in the door.