BetaKit covered NYC-based data analytics startup SumAll when the company launched its SumAll Traffic tool and more recently when the company announced integration with Instagram for analytics around the popular photo-sharing platform. Today the company announced that it raised $6 million in funding led by Battery Ventures in addition to Wellington Partners, bringing the company’s total funding to date up to $7.5 million with a $1.5 million round raised in the summer.
CEO Dane Atkinson spoke to BetaKit about what the funding will be used for, and the traction the company continues to see among its target market of SMBs. “I think we’ve found a good mix with our customers, they like what we’re doing, so we’re just going to do more of it. Basically, that means doing more integrations, adding more features, one of the features we added just a couple of days ago is projections,” said Atikinson in an interview. “33 percent of it has involved people projecting sales, but the rest of it has been on all sorts of things, like the number of likes you’re going to get, the number of fans.”
The company is up to 16,000 users for its ‘analytics for everyone tool,’ which attempts to give SMB owners the ability to access and correlate their data from a variety of sources, from ecommerce data pulled via integrations with eBay, Amazon, PayPal and Stripe, to website data from Google Analytics, to social data from Facebook and Twitter, and more recently Instagram. Companies can then run data queries and analyze how activity in one service affects another, for example to determine the value of a Facebook like, or a website visit as it relates to sales.
Atkinson said since launching Instagram to its list of data sources, users have been able to see how their photos translate to engagement online. “It seems to have a much bigger influence than we expected. It’s small in the overall set of influence, but its return ratio is very high. So people who have been using it successfully have been getting a lot of leverage out it. And the advocacy and engagement is literally tenfold that of Facebook, meaning if you get a commenter and people liking your photo, you get much more out of them,” Atkinson added.
The company will also be rolling out integration with YouTube, and is actively pursuing talks with Pinterest. As far as the competitive landscape is concerned, Atkinson believes SumAll is out to define a new category, namely that of connected data, where it isn’t a data visualization company like Platfora, which also recently raised $20 million, or Venngage‘s “visualizations for marketers” platform. While SumAll is out to let SMBs compare data across all their social and online accounts, they will face competition from a number of online analytics tools, from simple options like Google Analytics, to more robust tools like Chartio and Mixpanel.
He also noted that the company will be looking out to roll out some premium features and accounts in the new year in order to start monetizing the platform, however, the focus still continue to remain on the user experience for the time being. With the addition of another round of funding and new features and platform integrations on the way, the company will look be a turn-key tool for SMBs looking to make sense of their data without a team or engineers and analysts. Despite its early traction, it will need to find a way to monetize in 2013 in order to make the platform not just valuable for customers, but for the company’s investors and team.