Quantifind, whose technology is designed to find relevant marketing signals amid the noise of unstructured data, has raised $12 million in a strategic growth round led by Comcast Ventures and Iris Capital.
The company had raised about $10.5 million in the last eight months, according to cofounder and CEO Ari Tuchman, although this does not represent the totality of the company’s financing. The funding will be used to scale Quantifind’s technology and ramp up sales efforts into new verticals and use cases.
Cofounders Tuchman and John Stockton, both PhDs in physics, noted early Quantifind media and entertainment customers had run into walls when they looked to extract meaningful ROI from social data feeds, thus identifying the marketer pain point they first wished to solve.
“Going back a couple of years, the 100 or so social listening companies… [solved buzz and sentiment] but neither of those had a correlation to how a movie actually performed at the box office and, therefore, wasn’t giving the company anything actionable to steer results at the box office,” Tuchman said.
Quantifind charges on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) basis per brand per month while offering “guidance on both media optimization and creative strategy,” Tuchman said. “All the incredible work in big data storage and programmatic and optimized targeting and this ability to reach an audience at a very specific level is awesome work we’re building on to help you act on data more quickly.”
What are those datasets Quantifind quantifies? Social is certainly part of it, but offline data like call logs, surveys and company buyer and seller financials and information, are also facets. The company, at 45 strong, has expanded its technical team and is scaling up its sales efforts.
“We’ve expanded our work with many major studios and helping them optimize their creative and targeting, to work with telco, automotive and apparel – really any industry where there’s a lot of social chatter that’s very noisy,” Tuchman said. “The ability to tap into that beyond awareness… [and looking at the] applicability of our technology to healthcare, finance, government.”
Although Quantifind is not the only analytics provider that has gotten a fresh injection to make big data analysis more marketer-friendly, the company’s board and management team have a diverse pedigree that underlie its potential.
David Karnstedt, longtime Yahoo ad exec and former SVP and GM of media and ad solutions at Adobe and CEO of Efficient Frontier, serves on the board of the Andreessen Horowitz and Redpoint Ventures-backed company. Chief Strategy Officer Sean St. Clair was VP of solutions at OMD’s Annalect Group and VP of Marketing Tom Thai came from Twitter’s big social television acquisition, BlueFin Labs.
