Dutch entrepreneur Bastiaan Janmaat (the tall guy in the picture) is co-founder of Silicon Valley based DataFox, a search engine and tracking algorithm for companies. The startup just secured 5 million dollars, a round led by Goldman Sachs and Green Visor Capital. We talked to him about the investment and the future of his startup.
The first seed round (1.8 million dollar) was led by Google Ventures in 2013. Today DataFox announced the third ‘seed’ round for DataFox – lead by Janmaat’s former employer: Goldman Sachs. And we say ‘seed’ because it’s not a convertible notes investment, but an equity round. It’s a so called ‘series seed‘ round – which means less complexity than a series A and more control for the entrepreneurs.
The investment will be used to quickly expand the team, Janmaat said to StartupJuncture: “Our costs are mostly R&D and we just moved to a new office where we can host 35 employees. Right now our team consists of 14 people and we’re recruiting 10 more.”
Right now the startup has “hundreds” of customers which pay an average of 10,000 dollar a year to use the tool.
DataFox algorithm
DataFox’ search algorithm makes it possible for banks and VC’s to spot the next hot company, helps sales & marketing teams to find the next client and innovation teams can use it for research.
The startup’s database consists of 600.000 companies, in which the algorithm adds about 500 new companies per day, Janmaat said. “However, human labour is needed as well to check.”
Analytical layer
The first thing that might come to mind is Crunchbase. But DataFox isn’t really similar. “Actually, it’s one of the many sources to our business. What makes us different is that we add an analytical layer over the data. For instance: for investors, the startup discovers their biggest criteria for success and shows them what they can do with it – by highlighting the right companies on the exact right time.”
Janmaat sees Salesforce’s Data.com as a fierce competitor for DataFox. “But our biggest competitor is manual search in Google, or an analyst living in Excel.”