Finally, a tech company that’s not all about big data. In fact, this one is about lots of little bits of “idiosyncratic, messy data,” says its founder. And it puts those bits together to help small businesses make better decisions and, ultimately, more money.
InsightSquared, based in Cambridge, MA, has been fairly quiet in the press, but today it’s announcing a $4.5 million Series A financing round led by Atlas Venture (those VCs have been busy lately). Bessemer Venture Partners, NextView Ventures, and Salesforce.com also participated in the round. The startup previously raised a $1 million seed round in late 2010.
In tech-business jargon, InsightSquared sits at the intersection of SaaS, SMBs, CRM, analytics, business intelligence, and data visualization. That means the company makes software designed to give small and medium-size businesses access to tools that help them do things like analyze sales data, summarize deal progress, identify top-performing employees, and get various snapshots of how their business is doing—and do it all cheaply and quickly.
That might sound a bit nebulous, but giants like IBM and SAP make a fortune on selling expensive business intelligence software and services to big companies. Smaller companies often can’t afford the investment in time or money, so they end up doing nothing, or just using Excel spreadsheets—which is where InsightSquared is looking to make its mark.
The company’s technology lets customers pull data from multiple sources, including Google Analytics and Salesforce.com, and boil it down to a few key questions to address, whether it’s for sales leads or accounts receivable. (It also tries to correct errors in the data—a key issue for all businesses.) The software presents the data in an interactive dashboard; you can drill down to the transaction level or take broader slices. The interface uses cutting-edge
