Businesses looking for ways to provide insights based on data around benchmarks and industry analysis are a big draw in venture capital these days. From our fellow AOL brand CrunchBase, to data and analytics companies like Compass, these types of services offer multi-million dollar opportunities that investors are finding increasingly attractive.
In the case of CrunchBase, it’s AOL, who is pondering both internal and external capital commitments to grow that business, while for Compass, the business monitoring and intelligence service, it’s financial luminaries like Intesa Sanpaolo and Oliver Rothschild and venture capital firms like NEA, PROfounders and Crosslink Capital, alongside previous investors Steve Blank, Alan Morgan, Roger Krakoff and Rhodium.
The San Francisco-based company has raised $3 million in two recent tranches of financing from that clutch of investors looking for a way to create a taxonomy for the success of startups.
Compass has made a name for itself as the creator of the Startup Genome Reports, which use massive amounts of data to try and analyze the factors that contribute to a startup’s success or failure.
So Compass provides intelligence to businesses by crowdsourcing business performance data in exchange for free benchmarks and industry insights. More than 30,000 companies are connecting feeds from PayPal, Stripe, Google Analytics, Mailchimp and other software as a service companies to create a comprehensive database of private technology data.
That data is also shareable with investors and consultants thanks to the company’s newly launched Compass Monitor, which allows an entire portfolio of startups to be tracked and monitored. With the new product launch, Compass is offering special launch pricing for the Compass Monitor product.
The company said it will use the capital to finance the build out of its team of data analysts, engineers and business analysts.
“With a growing wealth of business data easily accessible, we have an unprecedented opportunity to learn about the nature of businesses and their ecosystems at scale,” says Bjoern Herrmann, Compass’ chief executive. “By bringing this new insight and transparency into the global business ecosystem we can fundamentally transform the way businesses are run and interact with each other.”
Photo via Flickr user Christopher Brown.