Vancouver-based Klue has launched out of stealth with $4 million in funding.
The round was led by OMERS Ventures, with participation from BDC Venture Capital, Vancouver Founder Fund, SK Ventures, and angels including Ryan Holmes (CEO of Hootsuite), Jonathan Ehrlich (partner of Foundation Capital), and Daniel Debow (former SVP Salesforce, CEO of Helpful).
Klue’s platform targets B2B tech companies, and enables them to keep track of competitors’ businesses, as competitor data is often scattered across web, chat, and documents. The platform combines information shared by co-workers with bot-collected intel from across the web into battlecards and living dashboards of competitor activity.
The goal is to help product marketers keep competitive content up to date, and help salespeople find and leverage that content inside applications they use everyday, such as Slack, the web, and Salesforce. The platform was launched by Jason Smith, former president of Vision Critical, and Sarathy Naicker, former CTO at Sophos.
“Where this really hits home is with B2B enterprise sales teams,” said Smith, CEO of Klue. “Thirty percent or more of deals are lost directly to a competitor. It stings to lose a deal that should have been won. Klue gives you a continuously updated lens into your competitors world so you can to better position your company against your rivals, improve your sales strategies with prospects, and ultimately close more deals.”
Dell EMC, Hootsuite, Sage, Paychex, K2, Absolute Software, and DXC are among Klue’s customers.
“By applying a machine learning intermediary to help scale down the volume of content, and giving enablement teams the tools to deliver, intel is less noisy, more succinct and ultimately more digestible for sales teams to run with,” said Naicker, CTO of Klue.
