Here’s an update on a quintessential Boston tech startup. InsightSquared, which got started in 2011, said Wednesday it has pulled in $23 million in Series D funding.
The round was led by Tola Capital, with previous investors Accomplice, DFJ, Two Sigma Ventures, and NextView Ventures also participating. The new money brings InsightSquared’s total funding to $50 million. The company currently has 113 employees, according to a spokeswoman.
When I visited InsightSquared’s offices in Copley Square last fall, the company seemed to be going through a rebirth. It started out as a business intelligence and data visualization company, focused on analyzing sales data and looking to disrupt the IBMs and SAPs of the world. It went through some ups and downs, including layoffs, and in the past year it has refocused on what it calls “revenue intelligence”—basically, giving sales and marketing organizations more sophisticated tools to analyze business metrics and make better decisions (and more accurate revenue forecasts).
Fred Shilmover (pictured), the company’s CEO and co-founder, told me InsightSquared has ridden a wave of “data-driven sales”—which came after data analytics started making an impact on marketing departments. In a promising sign, Shilmover said his startup “has been moving up and working with larger and larger companies.” Like a lot of business software startups, InsightSquared started out selling its products to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), but has moved into enterprise sales as it matured.
The company’s 800-plus customers now include Thomson Reuters and business communications company Mitel. But Shilmover said, “We haven’t abandoned our SMB roots. … We learned if you make a product easy to use for smaller customers, then bigger ones can, too.”
A big trend Shilmover pointed to is companies of all sizes working to optimize their sales processes, often in conjunction with marketing. There’s “a huge change afoot in sales,” he said. “If you’re not a data-fluent sales leader, you’re going to become a dinosaur. The job of sales is changing dramatically.”
