Global Database, an information aggregator company, raised €1.1M out of their €1.4M target in a week on Seedblink, a Romanian crowdfunding platform. This comes after six years of developing the end-product and building relationships with their customers, partners, and understanding their competitors.
“Two versions of the product later, we are looking for yet another scaling opportunity. Right now, we have the right product for the right customer, and we know the market is immense and waiting. We are confident in scaling up our business and guaranteeing investment capital growth,” Vitalie Aremescu, co-founder and CTO of Global Database, shared with The Recursive.
Getting access to global data
Global Database is working on solving access to global data. Their research suggests that only 30% of it is covered. By gathering information from over 120 million companies in 195 countries, the platform generates contact details, financial reports, risks, and daily alerts. Their main tools are Sales APP, Marketing APP, and Compliance and Due Diligence APP.
In the next few years, they want to develop new solutions to provide vetted data for marketing and sales departments from over 450 million companies. This way, specialists can spot business opportunities and avoid risky deals. The target is to become the largest source of digital B2B information and to open offices in the US, UK, and Singapore.
“We believed those markets were the right ones to address at the time. By narrowing our focus there, our team learned the right lessons. This is how we built the go-to hub for corporate data that features the best experience and QoS (quality of service) there is. Of course, we have built paths to other markets and have prepared the grounds for delivering a global service,” said Aremescu about their experience with the UK and US markets.
The evolution of the database
Global Database was founded in 2015 by Nicolae Buldumac and Vitalie Aremescu. Buldumac brought the experience in the sales and marketing department from England, while Aremescu brought his IT experience from the Republic of Moldova. The company’s headquarters are in Northampton, Romford, England.
Within a few weeks from the launch, their initial data aggregator proved to be a success. The customers validated it and the founders called it “Version Jump-ON”. Two years later, the second version of the platform was launched. This was titled: “Facepalm”.
The new version did not meet their expectations. The team was faced with coming up with new technical solutions that will solve the “Big Data Challenge”, which was processing and updating billions of data points daily.
In 2019, the Third Version, and the current one, was launched. The aggregator can deliver structured and updated data, including up to 20 years of digitized financial statements, group structure, and credit risk information. While the first version processed a few gigabytes, the third one managed a few tens of terabytes.
Their solution, to offer sales teams the opportunity to access verified partners and suppliers, will automate processes and save time. To do this, the Global Database team will continue to add intel from official sources, public sources, and partnerships with local and international strategic data providers.
Since the launch, the company has worked with over 100 corporate clients and has offered public information to over 350K users monthly. Amongst their clients, there are Amazon AWS, Uber, Orange, Vodafone, British Council, 3M, Getty Images, and Stanford University.
The future of information
For 2021, the company estimates a revenue of €1M, almost double compared to the previous year. The company has grown organically, funded only by the two co-founders. They believe that there will be a significant demand for online data on the market since companies will work more with digital information. Their research shows that due to the pandemic, companies are paying more attention to whom they partner with.
“We invested our own money and resources. Starting with less than £100K in assets, we’ve generated over £2M (around €2.3M) in revenue, re-investing everything. Our primary focus was set on SaaS development, acquisition of reliable data sources, and enhancing data processing reliability. We are confident that GDB will be driving its EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) from 20% to 50%, in the next year,” Aremescu shared.
Forrester Research included Global Database in the report “The Forrester Wave™: B2B Marketing Data Providers, Q2 2021”. The company was described as “a strong competitor with great potential for development”. According to Forrester, the total estimated market value for sales, marketing, and compliance was worth €23M. GBD wants to own 1% of this market by 2030 and targets revenue growth of €15M by 2024.
