PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Infer Inc., a company that delivers data-powered business applications inspired by the consumer web, today announced it has closed $10 million in Series A funding led by Redpoint Ventures, with Andreessen Horowitz, Social+Capital Partnership, Sutter Hill Ventures, and influential angel investors also participating in the round. Infer helps businesses accurately predict and act on their highest potential customers.
Infer’s solutions mine the historical customer won/lost records sitting in companies’ sales and marketing databases, pull in hundreds of valuable signals from untapped web sources, and build statistical models that accurately identify customers with the highest propensity to buy. This approach leverages advanced information retrieval and machine learning algorithms to model customer data, along with company financials, social media presence, job listings, legal filings and other external information. As a result, Infer unearths actionable revenue-driving insights that businesses can leverage to prioritize their flow of leads, focus on their best prospects, and ultimately win more customers in less time.
“Infer’s predictive solution has helped our sales force deal with lead overload by prioritizing those with the highest likelihood to engage and close,” said Jim Herbold, executive vice president of sales at Box. “The application integrates quickly, and delivers real lift – in our case, more than doubling the conversion rate from our highest volume lead sources.”
Infer has closed several multi-year customer agreements, attaining early profitability. Its models have consistently achieved significant lifts in conversion rates for customers across the board, including several Fortune 1000 companies and some of the hottest emerging technology companies in the market, like Box, Jive Software, Tableau, Yammer and Zendesk.
“While the sales and marketing automation markets have been strong over the last several years, automation is not enough,” said Satish Dharmaraj, partner at Redpoint Ventures. “The much larger opportunity is to bring enterprises deep data science wrapped up in simple application services that anyone can use. Infer’s world class team is bringing web search, machine learning and personalization smarts from places like Google, using it to harness enterprises’ untapped big data for the first time, and gleaning amazing topline value for its customers. This is a rocketship.”
Infer’s founding team is led by Vik Singh, who was listed in MIT’s Top 35 under 35 list for helping to create the popular open search platform Yahoo! BOSS. The company’s technology leadership includes co-founders Yang Zhang, an ex-Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! and MIT researcher, and Chung Wu, who was formerly the front-end tech lead of Google’s Public Data project.
“When my co-founders and I set out to create Infer, we were shocked by how poorly even the biggest, most innovative companies manage and act on their own internal data – especially given the amazing advances we’ve seen in the data science used for the consumer web,” said Vik Singh, co-founder and CEO of Infer. “For example, there’s way more intelligence being applied in Facebook’s newsfeed telling you that your friends are getting drinks across the street than there is in helping companies make critical decisions that could have serious consequences like massive layoffs. It’s time for a change. We intend to bring the product thinking and data intelligence of the consumer space to the enterprise, and deliver data science applications that solve real problems and ‘just work’ seamlessly in existing workflows.”
Infer will use its Series A funding to grow its team of engineers and scientists, as well as to deliver and apply its solution to more companies and customer intelligence problems. In addition, Satish Dharmaraj of Redpoint Ventures will join the company’s board of directors.
To hear what Infer customer Box has to say about the company’s solutions, watch here: https://www.infer.com/customers/box.html.
About Infer
Founded in 2010, Infer delivers data-powered business applications that help companies win more customers. Its cloud-based applications leverage proven data science to rapidly model the untapped data sitting in enterprises, along with hundreds of external signals from the web. Inspired by the simplicity of the consumer web, Infer delivers seamless, data-driven applications that anyone can get up and running in just days. Customers include several of the Fortune 1000 and numerous high growth companies. Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, Infer is funded by leading investors, including Redpoint Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Social+Capital Partnership and Sutter Hill Ventures. For more information, visit www.infer.com or read the company’s blog at blog.infer.com.
