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Burbank-based Connectivity has bootstrapped since its launch (under the name Solfo), but raised $6.3 million last month because the team “found some great investors.” Great is a humble word to describe their investors: Greycroft, TenOneTen, SLP are just a few of the big names now backing the SaaS database company.
The funding will help the Connectivity team to staff their sales and marketing teams while pushing towards their goal of having 104,000 businesses using Connectivity by end of 2015. Passing that number won’t be an issue - already 92,000 businesses are on board using Connectivity to manage their brand and to get intelligent insights on their customers.
“We’re crushing the numbers,” co-founder and COO Emad Fanous said. “The company’s been exploding in Q1. It’s a ton of data we’re sitting on for both businesses and consumers.”
This datamine Fanous is referring to includes pretty much every data point a business would want to know about its customers: everything from their social media and reviewing behavior to their purchasing history.
“We are able to aggregate some information about consumers and tell businesses where they are coming from - like whether they are mostly males or mostly females all the way down to if they drive a Prius and play Minecraft,” Fanous said.
Fanous knows the power of this data: he previously was CTO of Citysearch and operated local search directories like YellowBot under the Solfo name.
“It’s really about helping to close the loop between what’s happening online and offline with the business,” Fanous said.
But Connectivity doesn’t just give businesses aggregated customer data: its CRM component gives them the ability to message their customers. Although Connectivity offers up its API, the majority of businesses are using its white label versions, Fanous said.
Connectivity also gives businesses a way to consolidate their brand online and to manage reviews across various sites, which is especially handy for enterprises, agencies and certified marketing representatives - the next targets for Connectivity's growing user base.
“We will be going after enterprises," Fanous said. "We’ve already started building enterprise tools to allow enterprises to consume a lot of this data, whether they are managing a hundred locations or a thousand locations."
