Tinyclues announced this week that they have secured a €1.4 Million round of investment from a suite of investors which includes Criteo-investor Elaia Partners; the startup says the vast majority of the money will go to improving their Predictive CRM, which crunches data on millions of existing and potential customers in order to identify evolving customers trends & potential customers most likely to purchase a given product.
Founded by Jakob Haesler & David Bessis (SEE: [Interview] tinyclues founder David Bessis on their big launch year and the importance of the team), the 12-person team will look to double its size in the coming year, hiring software engineers and product managers. Speaking with David Bessis about the fundraising, I asked him whether he hopes to bring on Data Scientists to the team, to which Bessis jokingly referred to them as “Unicorns” – the term used to describe something so rare to find that, even when found, one rarely has the right tools (i.e: money) to capture it.
Tinyclues’ SaaS CRM does not compete with your traditional CRM players; indeed, Bessis warns that, since they need large amounts of data in order to find the ‘tiny clues’ which they use to identify trends in buyers, their customers typically have 1 Million or more leads in their CRM, and never less than 500,000. Tinyclues leverages everything from social data to website data about customers in order to track trends as they evolve. Bessis’ cited FIFA ’14 as an example of a product where, while the initial customer base may be ‘geeks’ and other early adopters, as the holiday season rolls around, parents will be buying the game for their kids and other customer types will begin to emerge, trends which tinyclues boasts have helped increase customer revenue by 30% or more.
When asked whether tinyclues was eying the US for expansion, Bessis noted that the team “wants to go to the USA” when the product is ready, which will all depend on their ability to hire the right people – Bessis noted that product managers are typically difficult to hire in France, as there is no culture around hiring such a position early on (unlike in the USA & UK), and so there isn’t a large pool of people looking to be hired for such a position.
With investment from Elaia Partners & ISAI, tinyclues continues my theory about the “Exalead Mafia” – current employee Adrien Guillo formerly worked at Exalead – and follows a trend of applying Big Data to different sectors that I have enjoyed seeing from the likes of pre-targeting startup Ezakus.
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