A few years ago, co-founders Leena Joshi, Ben Chang, and Eric Buchanan were frustrated with the manual work involved in gathering information about their sales and marketing accounts. The marketplace’s tools, they say, focused solely on gathering information rather than curating what was actually relevant, actionable and up-to-date.
Cheung and Buchanan have leveraged their expertise in AI and machine learning to see the potential to increase sales and marketing productivity by applying AI algorithms to workflows. Their work, along with Joshi’s, spawned his CloseFactor, a platform aimed at gathering actionable information about companies from a variety of sources.
“Built to harness the enormous potential in automating manual investigations through the large-scale adoption of machine learning techniques, CloseFactor helps B2B sales and marketing teams include the right people in their accounts. , helps identify the right target accounts, and the go-to-market team has a blueprint to execute the strategy and reach their goals,” says Joshi. “Our goal is to be the marketing go-to operating system for revenue teams.”
Before co-launching CloseFactor in 2019, Joshi, Cheung, and Buchanan had a long history of building B2B technology. Joshi held senior positions at his VMware, Splunk, and Redis Labs for several years, and Cheung sold his first startup, the virtual assistant his platform Genee, to Microsoft for an undisclosed amount. Before joining Google, Buchanan also worked at Microsoft, before moving to LinkedIn as head of machine learning for LinkedIn Talent Solutions.
CloseFactor analyzes attributes of closed deals (deals at the end of the sales cycle), sales strategies, and CloseFactor’s own data to identify the ideal customer profile and the number of accounts that fit that definition. , to identify different accounts. On top of that, CloseFactor segments accounts by who is most ready to buy by curating insights such as hiring trends and new projects and initiatives that target businesses have underway.
CloseFactor also gives you a bird’s eye view of all your accounts, stack ranked from the most ready to buy.
“CloseFactor automates account research and allows you to dive deep into all your accounts, whether it’s a current or future project or initiative, a decision maker or influencer you want to reach out to,” says Joshi. “CloseFactor allows us to attract the right message to the right buyer at the right time. No existing tool offers this kind of automation or visibility at scale.”
With customers such as LaunchDarkly, Chronosphere, Sourcegraph, and Zuora, CloseFactor competes with both intent data providers and contact databases such as ZoomInfo. But the platform’s momentum has clearly impressed investors. Vertex Ventures led his $15.2 million Series A round at CloseFactor, with Sequoia participating, bringing the startup’s total funding to his $20.5 million.
Joshi said the recent infusion will be used to expand CloseFactor’s product development efforts, create a go-to-market team, and build out some new workflow integrations.
“We have already grown 5,411% since the first quarter and will continue to focus on solving our customers’ problems,” he said. “The biggest competition we face in trading today is the status quo. The way revenue teams define their ideal customer profiles and target markets is broken, leading to significant inefficiencies in sales and marketing execution. increase.”
Based in Palo Alto, Calif., CloseFactor currently has 20 employees and plans to hire this year.
