startups offering business intelligence services while being more accessible and less expensive than existing enterprises (see IBM/Unica as well). More recent companies in that vein include Marketo and Eloqua in the field of marketing automation.
But Quant5 is positioning itself differently from all of those. “We’re a marriage of software-as-a-service and the most advanced analytics. That’s a new type of company,” Levin says. “It’s a disruptive force in the marketplace. But potentially a force for good.”
I asked Levin for the applicable lessons from his previous companies, including Black Duck Software, LucidWorks, and Ayeah Games (which folded last year). From Black Duck and LucidWorks, his takeaway is “open source is great … it’s so effective these days.”
As for Ayeah, a data-driven gaming startup, Levin says he’s learned from his mistakes. “We couldn’t get costs to meet the revenue curve,” he says. A big factor was timing: “Facebook was changing its attitude toward Facebook games,” he says. So Ayeah “would have been much more successful” had it started a year earlier, he says, and it also would be cheaper to run today.
Levin hopes he has the timing right this time. “Quant5 is in an industry that’s growing like crazy. Hopefully we will emerge as one of the leaders in predictive analytics,” he says. “There’s a huge market available to us in the United States and internationally. We will go after more markets and more software applications. We want to build a company that’s around for years.”
