Predictive analytics player Infer raises $25 million
Predictive analytics is a rapidly growing offshoot of the big data boom, and companies riding on its wake - such as the Palo Alto-based startup Infer - are finding similar success.
The company announced Thursday that it has closed a $25 million Series B funding round led by inside investor Redpoint Ventures. This brings the company's total financing to $35 million, following a $10 million Series A raise last year.
Infer says it will use the cash flow to expand innovation around new applications, ramp up hiring, and boost sales and marketing efforts.
Featured
Infer's technology angle largely targets sales teams looking to hone in on which leads are the best to follow. Using a scoring platform, Infer mines a company's historical customer data from places like CRM and marketing systems, and then combines that data even more data about an individual and the organization they work for.
More specifically, it looks at a company's website, its social media presence, job postings, patent filings - basically whatever behavior-signaling information is publicly available - and creates score that can help sales teams filter out the bad leads.
In the 18 months since its launch, Infer has amassed a notable roster of clients, including Cloudera, Optimizely, SurveyMonkey, Box and Zendesk. Last month the company joined the Salesforce Analytics Cloud ecosystem, a move that further integrated its sales insights into the CRM giant's dashboards.
Infer founders include data scientist Vik Singh, who hails from Yahoo, Google and Microsoft, along with ex-Googlers Yang Zhang and Chung Wu.
"We've sparked a data revolution that goes way beyond lead scoring. Our predictive platform is helping enterprises achieve the same consumer-grade data intelligence as companies like Google and Amazon, and delivering big wins for our customers - like 4X conversion rates and 3X deal sizes," Singh said in a statement. "Given our growth and leadership in the market, we were very fortunate to receive considerable VC interest from both outside and inside investors."