InsideView, an Intelligence Dashboard for Salespeople, Raises $12 Million
When you’re gathering information on a potential sales prospect, there’s an awful lot of places to look. A decent Google search only gets you part of the way there. You can look for mentions in the media, find them on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, but you also need to know what’s going on within that person’s company.
InsideView, which today announced $12 million in funding in a series C round led by Foundation Capital, aims to be something of a personal CIA for salespeople. The service deploys within existing CRM applications like Oracle, SAP, Salesforce.com, Microsoft CRM and SugarCRM to enhance the information view on a person or company with data gathered from numerous sources. When you look at the window for a target, you see information taken from their LinkedIn and Facebook profiles, information about them from Jigsaw, but also what people are saying about their company on Twitter. There’s also corporate financial and relationship data from CaptialIQ–a powerful financial database owned by McGraw-Hill–and a news feed from Thomson-Reuters.
Yes, it’s another social enterprise software play says CEO Umberto Milletti, but with one key difference. “Most of the social CRM space has been focused on the marketing and support use cases. We’re very focused on business-to-business sales,” he told me. “It’s using social media together with traditional news and financial information to make salespeople more productive. We turn all that information into business intelligence.”
With the funding round, Foundation’s Paul Holland, a former exec at Kana Communications, is joining the InsideView board. Its prior investors–who are also participating in this round–are Emergence Capital Partners, Rembrandt Venture Partners and Greenhouse Capital Partners.
The company has more than 1,000 corporate customers, including Adobe, BMC, Cap Gemini, Experian and SuccessFactors, and supports some 75,000 end users.
Millietti said the funding will be used to boost distribution. “We want to get every customer-facing sales professional in the world an InsideView acount,” he said.
