Toronto startup Vantage Analytics has raised $1.1 million in seed funding from Real Ventures and several angels within the retail and ecommerce space.
The company offers a business-friendly interface software, built on powerful predictive analytics and data mining modules. It helps businesses work with the data provided by their own customers to boost sales and influence repeat customers.
Among the other angels or companies that participated in the round were PBX Innovations, the team behind Paybox (the first mass marketable global mobile payment company, which was acquired by Sybase/SAP in 2008), Brad Badeau (cofounder of CertaPay), and Greg Wolfond (cofounder of 724 Solutions and SecureKeyTechnologies). Darrell MacMullin (former managing director of PayPal Canada and former Director of Marketing of EBay/EBay Canada) is also an advisor to Vantage Analytics.
Founded in Toronto in 2013 by Aran Hamilton and Brandon Kane, “experts in e-commerce, and big data analytics,” Vantage is building the future of data analytics by making big data easy for anyone to understand and act upon. While companies around the world struggle to make use of their data, Vantage Analytics offers its interface solution to help founders understand what the numbers mean and how they can make decisions.
“We are helping thousands of merchants from over 60 countries to turn their data into insight, and insight into action. Our expert recommendations are based on millions of customer records and hundreds of millions of dollars of transactions,” said cofounder Aran Hamilton. “With this new funding, we will look to other leading ecommerce platforms such as Magento, Volusion, and BigCommerce as opportunities for strategic partnerships, while deepening our offering to Shopify merchants.”
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“Vantage Analytics is offering both ecommerce and brick and mortar stores the ability to rapidly gain insight into their businesses and take action in real time based on their powerful recommendations,” said JS Cournoyer, a partner with Real Ventures. “We are thrilled to invest in this exciting team that has already achieved much in a very short period of time.”
Vantage Analytics said it will use the funds towards its “market-leading data mining and predictive analytics offering,” as well as a “hiring blitz”.
For Vantage, its not the first time the company has appeared in BetaKit. The company is a member of Shopify’s Plus Partner Program, where its data mining tools are integrated into Shopify’s platform for online ecommerce stores. In fact, by March the company had already analyzed over 800,000 transactions via Shopify stores.