Based in 7 countries, including the UK and North Macedonia, AI-driven sales acceleration company Cognism has just raised a $12.5M series B round, led by existing investors AXA Venture Partners, Investiere, and VentureFounders, and supported by a new investor – Swisscom Ventures. This brings the total funding received by the company to over $39.3M. Headquartered in London, Cognism will use the fresh funding for its European expansion and to further provide intelligent B2B marketing and sales data to customers.
As noted by Stefan Kuentz, Partner at Swisscom Ventures, sales intelligence is of the utmost importance as it boosts the productivity of sellers in the current home office reality. This is why, he stated, Cognism is well-positioned to further expand and become the leading company in Europe.
Tracking records
Established in 2015, the startup offers a GDPR-compliant sales and marketing platform that provides access to real-time data. The platform that relies on computational and statistical methods, as well as machine learning technology, is able to cover and identify 400 million business profiles, from B2B companies through small enterprises, in order to extract data to companies that can be used for improving conversions across a company.
The latest round comes after the company announced ARR growth by 60% year-on-year to December 2020 from $7M to $11M. In January 2021, Cognism also saw unprecedented growth as its new-business ARR and monthly revenue both exceeded $1M. So far, the solutions of Cognism are offered in 30 countries and have reached over 1000 customers, while the company itself also has teams located in the USA, Canada, and South Africa. The North Macedonian teams of Cognism are invested in the company’s research and engineering activities.
Getting prospecting to the next level
The sales solution of the company enables new customer identification through an intelligent sequencing pipeline and personalized outreach to both potential customers and prospective employees. When it comes to marketing, the unified platform gathers in one multi-channel marketing and campaign targeting based on intelligent data analysis. In practice, the solutions can not only be used for attracting customers but can also be integrated with a business’ CRM for retail and internet analysis, as well as staff recruitment, and training. According to the study cases of the company, its information technology services have enabled companies such as Flowingly to increase their Structured Query Language (SQL) volume by 80% (thus increasing the amount of data stored in their database), while also facilitating the cleaning of 150 000 data entries (CXO Cockpit).
The investors
- AXA Venture Partners is a Parish-headquartered VC that manages $800M, whose portfolio is comprised of international companies such as health tech Valera Health, data tech DocAuthority, as well e-commerce shipping startup Sendcloud.
- Investiere – the Switzerland-based VC has made over 130 investments and achieved 5 exits, as reported by Crunchbase.
- VentureFounders – the UK equity investment VC was established in 2014 and has 35 portfolio companies, including digital insurance provider DeadHappy and digital mortgage startup Habito.
- Swisscom Ventures – the Switzerland-based VC is an arm of telecom and ICT provider Swisscom AG. Its portfolio companies include e-learning company Labster that recently raised a $60M series C round, as well as chip link solutions company Kandou that recently raised $90.2M from its series C round
- The regional fund South Central Ventures also supported Cognism back in 2018 by providing $2M for the early development of the company.
