"It's time to retire the hunter-gatherer style of collecting startup intelligence."
TALLINN, Estonia (PRWEB) April 06, 2015
Believing that startup-data intelligence should be accessible to all, Estonia-based Funderbeam (https://www.funderbeam.com) seeks to disrupt the market with a suite of low-cost startup-discovery and analysis tools. Built with €650k in seed funding, it has launched €39-€99 monthly subscriptions that serve angel investors, prospecting consultants, and bootstrapping startups. The company has 70,000 startups in its database and is set to close another funding round later this month.
The premise is simple. Behind their slick pitches, startups are notoriously opaque. As a result, many investors rely on random leads from their friends and colleagues, on top of unsolicited email pitches. It's a game of reacting to someone else's agenda. To make things worse, a quick X-ray of a startup's health is nearly impossible without convincing founders to open up their books.
"For most angels, consultants, and others, chatting up every interesting startup is humanly impossible. It'd also be a massive waste of founders' time," said Funderbeam Founder and CEO Kaidi Ruusalepp. "So, to find any relevant startup data, people scour the web for bits and pieces and still go home hungry. We think it's time to retire this hunter-gatherer style of collecting intelligence."
The company's team of 12 spent a year of cleaning and organizing data, testing models, and tweaking algorithms that help triangulate missing information. It helps people discover and track startups that fit their interests, supported by smart estimates, analysis, and benchmarking of various performance data. The result can be a godsend when scanning for potential investments, developing sales leads, or keeping an eye on competitors and existing portfolio companies.
"Funderbeam brings order, structure and depth to startup analysis. It's a crucial new tool," said Andrew Montgomery, Founding Partner at MESA Ventures. Marek Kiisa, one of the first investors in GrabCAD, a collaboration tool for CAD engineers that was acquired by Stratasys for $100m last year, agreed. "Startup data is messy. Funderbeam cleans it up and plugs the gaps."
Funderbeam isn't the first company to seek startup transparency, admits Villu Arak, one of the company's four cofounders. But as the team quickly discovered, free databases fall short on quality while more advanced data-intelligence services are expensive, costing anywhere from several hundred to more than a thousand euros/dollars per month.
"They're going after deep-pocketed corporates, which is a lucrative, if limited, niche," Arak said. "But if you're one of 250,000 business angels worldwide, it's overkill. You'd rather wax your wings than burn several thousand on startup data this year."
Funderbeam Highlights
- 70,000 startups in database
- 11 powerful startup-search filters
- Competitor mapping and benchmarking
- Startup and investor tracking: Follow them to know when they've raised money, grown their team, been in the news, etc.
- Performance X-rays: Startup analytics and benchmarking, plus valuation, next-funding, and development-stage estimates
- Funding Probability Score: a percentage estimate of a startup's likelihood of securing funding in the next round, recalculated daily
- Visual network maps that show the connections between people, companies, and investments
- 60 easily-understandable tag clusters -- essentially a new set of industry categories.
Beyond Data Trading
Funderbeam's ambition is to grow into a marketplace for early-stage investments. For that to happen, startups need to become more transparent first. Achieving that requires cleaner, more reliable data, better analytics -- and being user-friendly to us mortals behind these glowing screens. Stay tuned for the next chapter.
Useful Links
https://www.funderbeam.com
http://blog.funderbeam.com
https://www.funderbeam.com/startups/funderbeam
https://www.facebook.com/Funderbeam
https://twitter.com/funderbeam
Editorial Contact:
Villu Arak
Cofounder, Storytelling
Funderbeam
villu.arak(at)funderbeam(dot)com
mobile: +372 56 950 975 (CET +1)
