Editor’s note: Maria Rocio Paniagua currently works as a project manager at Innku, one of the top mobile and web workshops in Mexico. Follow her on Twitter.
Ondore, the leading Latin American big data analysis company that develops online reputation management systems, has closed its first investment round for $1.5 million dollars with Alta Ventures. The company says it will use the capital round to expand sales and marketing efforts in Latin America, as well as Spanish-speaking U.S.
Ondore’s reputation management systems work via data mining: The information obtained is processed, interpreted and sorted automatically. They have different products that target different pains in the market. Scout helps businesses understand and benefit from social media, providing them with deep insights into the conversations that are taking place on the web and interpreting things like sentiment, source and influence. They have also built an API that allows the integration of social media and web analytics with apps.
Ondore founder and CTO Fernando Luegue started the company eight years ago in Mexico City at the age of 18. During the first three years, Luegue alone conducted scientific research on algorithms that processed information and solved problems for enterprises. Then he developed one that automatically organized information and last year received a patent in the U.S.
With offices in San Francisco, under CEO Todd Stein, Ondore was bootstrapped until it had a 35-person team on board. “We did data mining in Latin America before we even came across the term,” Luegue says, and now, he added, Televisa (the largest media company in the Spanish-speaking world) and Ogilvy & Mather (one of the largest marketing and PR firms in LATAM) are among Ondore’s clients.
Finally last year, the company opened its investment round, visiting a plethora of VCs and private investors in both Mexico and Silicon Valley. They received a couple of offers, but decided to go with Alta, which, like Ondore, is based in Latin America and San Francisco. “I don’t want to talk about dumb money,” Luegue says, “but I can say that Alta’s technical side is incredibly talented.”
Ondore’s road has not been an easy one, however. Luegue says that building credibility and assembling a good team was challenging, as was penetrating a B2B market on an international level coming from a Latin American country.
In the next year, Ondore plans to consolidate its already strong lead in the Mexican and Latin American markets on the back of Scout, which the company says has some of the most competitive prices in the market.