If you’re like me, you have thousands of contacts scattered across your email, your phone, and various social networks but no good way to keep track of them all. You also aren’t very good at keeping in touch with all of those contacts, and you probably miss important details that they share on social channels because there are so damn many of them.
A company called Accompani wants to change all that with a platform that keeps tabs on all your contacts so you don’t have to, and it’s raised a $15 million Series B round to help get its product to market.
Accompani is the brainchild of former Google Analytics execs Amy Chang and Matthias Ruhl, who are using their background in data science and scaling computational systems to tackle the relationship management problem for busy professionals.
By pulling in data from user’s email, contacts, social and professional feeds and interlacing that data with info from their social graph, the company hopes to save users time while also providing them with insights they could use to improve relationships with others.
It’s a big problem, and one Accompani has been working on for about 18 months now. But the platform, which would incorporate both a web and mobile app, is still in alpha testing as the team tries to get things just right. The last thing it would want to do, according to Chang, is put out a product that is half-baked.
For now Accompani is focused on solving a few key issues. The first is just to help users to stay connected with contacts that are important to them. It plans to do that by analyzing interaction data to figure out which contacts they should focus on fostering better relationships with.
The second thing Accompani hopes to accomplish is to provide users with daily updates about what’s happening with key contacts. That can take the form of sharing updates from their social networks, changes in employment, or other significant milestones in their lives.
Finally, the service will have what Chang calls a “save your ass” feature — alerting users when they’ve failed to respond to an email, for instance, or reminding them to take care of other time-sensitive action items.
It had already raised $5.6 million in funding from Charles River Ventures and Cowboy Ventures as the team began initial buildout of the product. But it’s brought on an additional $15 million in a Series B round that also includes ICONIQ Capital, registered investment advisor to folks like Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Sean Parker, and Mark Pincus. Along with the ICONIQ investment, SurveyMonkey CEO Dave Goldberg is joining Accompani’s board of advisors.
The company already has a team of about 20, but is looking to expand ahead of launch. Next step is moving the service into beta and finalizing features before launching more broadly. The plan is to offer Accompani as a freemium service, with a premium tier of features that power users would pay for. In the meantime, it’s now got a fair amount of runway to figure things out.
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