FullContact, as the name suggests, is a contact management service for professionals and enterprises who need to intelligently manage their relationships and keep them intact. With plans to accelerate growth and fund acquisitions, the Denver-based company had raised a fresh $25 million a couple weeks ago.
Making its first move, the company has recently acquired Conspire, a four-year old startup that provides detailed analytics on your contacts, enabling you to find the suitable person to introduce you to the one you wanna get in touch with. Continuing its acquisition spree, FullContact is now spending more money to acquire a Kochi-based startup called Profoundis.
The terms of the deal haven’t been disclosed by either of the two parties, but this is a huge step for FullContact to invade and enter the Indian sub-continent. Post acquisition, all 70 team members of Profoundis will join FullContact, but most of them will still operate from India. The latter will convert the former’s office into its own local HQ and plans to scale to many thousands of employees in customer support, localization and other business teams over the next few years.
Profoundis Labs, an intelligent sales and business solutions company was founded in 2012 by four core members — Arjun Pillai, Anoop Thomas Mathew, Jofin Joseph, and Nithin Sam Oommen. It was a part of Startup Chile, where it received seed funding. It then graduated the Microsoft Accelerator Programme in 2013 and managed to raise an undisclosed amount one year later.
After launching about three somewhat successful but failed products, the company launched Vibe in 2014. And that is what is the leading lady in this acquisition.
As the saying goes — “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.” Vibe is designed with the aim to help businesses do better by providing contextual data about people and organizations. It is an intelligent service that comes in the form of extensions, sits inside your email account and surfaces in-depth information about your contacts. It works very much like Rapportive, but shows more data about a person than just his/her LinkedIn profile.
Having been partners for about an year, the two will now work together in integrating Vibe into FullContact’s contact management service. Though Vibe will continue to live on, it will directly be integrated into the FullContact ecosystem. The Profoundis team will also be working on bringing their human-based data research to other parts of the acquirer’s intelligent businesses and creating boundless synergies.
Commenting on the acquisition, co-founder and CEO Arjun Pillai, in the official blogpost says,
Becoming part of the FullContact team allows us to further execute on our mission globally, and together, our users will benefit by having more detailed information about their contacts, allowing them to be even more awesome with people.
We will continue serving all our customers. In the future, we will integrate directly inside of the FullContact ecosystem, allowing you to combine the best of machine intelligence with human intelligence.
This acquisition spree can be seen as an important move on the part of FullContact who is now trying to differentiate itself from LinkedIn, who has recently been acquired by Microsoft for $26.2 billion. It is planning to expand its technology and bet big on tremendous amount of user data which can be extracted and analysed to reach a more smarter and meaningful conclusion. Talking to TechCrunch, FullContact co-founder and CEO Bart Lorang said,
There are a lot of different types of work we can do. We plan to use [Profoundis’] technology-enhanced human data research solutions to build products and services that are dramatically smarter than anything the market has seen before.
FullContact was founded in 2010 by a trio of founders including Bart Lorang, Dan Lynn, and Travis Todd. It is largest directory of contacts online, and helps you stay organized, synchronized, and up to date with your relationships. It also has a powerful cross-platform suite of apps and API’s that enhance contacts with meaningful insights. It has raised close to $45 million(including the recent $25 mil) from a host of 19 investors including the likes of 500 Startups, Blue Note Ventures, Foundry Group, Techstars and many others.
