KnowledgeHound
Deal: $2.7M series A
Investors: George Spencer at Seyen Capital, Gaspar Group, InvestHER and BRJ Ventures
What they do: KnowledgeHound is a platform that helps companies find insights from market research data. Though Fortune 500 companies spend upwards of $40 billion on market research every year, it can be difficult to access that past research and insights. So KnowledgeHound's software allows market researchers, marketers and sales employees retrieve, visualize and analyze past market research studies through natural language queries in a search engine setting (they describe themselves as the 'Google for market research'). An employee at a candy company could search "what size candy bar do women prefer?" and KnowledgeHound's platform will show previous survey results that can provide an answer, along with the sample size and demographics of that study.
Founder Kristi Zuhlke previously worked at Procter & Gamble, and said the difficulty of retrieving past insights resulted in unnecessary duplicate research.
“As a former consumer insights manager at Procter & Gamble, we spent huge amounts of time and money rethinking the same problems and recreating data that already existed inside the company,” she said in a statement. “When KnowledgeHound went to market, our early traction among Fortune 500 companies validated our vision. With this new funding, we will accelerate our growth and help organizations reduce waste, connect with customers and get more value out of their data and insights.”
The company is working with several large companies, including Clorox, SC Johnson, Weber, Whirlpool and Procter & Gamble, according to their website.
Other details: The company, founded in 2013, previously raised a seed round of $1.2 million. KnowledgeHound will use this Series A funding to develop new technology to enhance the ways companies use their market research data to make insight and customer-driven decisions.
"We believe that the KnowledgeHound platform is key to the effective and efficient operation of today's market research organizations and it is also a key piece of infrastructure in enabling the integration of market research data with other data throughout the enterprise," said George Spencer, Senior Managing Director of Seyen Capital, in a statement.
