Artesian Solutions Scores $8M Series B For Its Sales Intelligence Platform

Artesian Solutions, the U.K.-based platform that provides companies with better intelligence on their B2B customers and future prospects, has raised $8 million in Series B funding.

Previous backer Octopus Investments, and Kreos Capital led the round, while the new injection of capital will enable the company to increase growth in the U.K. and further expand overseas, and well as continue development of new mobile and social apps.

Artesian currently claims 25,000 users, boasting major enterprise customers such as American Express, Adobe, Barclays, HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland, Towergate, Willis and Verizon.

One way to think of the platform is something akin to “Google Alerts on steroids”. Drawing from “millions of unstructured data sources per second,” including blogs, news sites, specialist company information, and social platforms such as Twitter and LinkedIn, its software builds insights to help employees stay better informed about customers, the wider industry sector and potential sales prospects. It then delivers this customer “intelligence” via Artesian Solutions’ web, mobile and tablet apps.

In addition, the platform provides daily email alerts (or “sales triggers”) about things of potential interest designed to give each sales person a reason to pick up the phone and engage with the buyer. It’s also not all one way: Artesian has built-in social sharing to help companies better engage with their customers and prospects via social media.

Competitors in the broad “accelerated sales” space are aplenty, including Amdocs, Aplicor, InsideSales.com, InsideView, NetSuite, Sage Business Solutions, Visible Technologies, and Zoho CRM.