12-22-2014

Our Investment in Mattermark

by Brad Feld

Last week we led a $6.5 million investment in Mattermark. Based in San Francisco, Mattermark’s mission is to organize the world’s business information to answer questions about the companies you want to do business with.

While there have been numerous efforts over the last 20 years to organize detailed private company data on the Internet, the end result is still lame. Classical search approaches like Google are a mess – you can get bits and pieces of the data, but it’s impossible to get what you want in one place. When you use public company data as a metaphor, it’s not surprising that Bloomberg still exists in the world of Google Finance, Yahoo Finance, MSN Money, and a continued list of non-comprehensive, relatively neglected data sets and presentation layers.

Today, the data signals about private companies are ubiquitous. But no one organizes the data effectively. When you buy a CRM system, it comes empty. Everyone re-collects similar data from a wide-variety of sources and ends up recreating the same spreadsheets to try to do data analysis. Much of the data that gets presented is in PDFs or other report formats that are not structured or searchable. When market research on private companies consists of Google searches, manual data entry by analysts, and spreadsheets to present information, there’s an opportunity.

Mattermark is going after the entire data ecosystem with a goal of making the definitive market research product for company information. The first phase of the business is to become the premier source for private company intelligence with the goal of building a fully-automated analytical infrastructure to enable data-enabled consulting.

Mattermark was originally founded in 2012 as Referly, which was a completely different company. The founders raised some money, realized they weren’t making any progress, shut down Referly, but took their remaining capital and pivoted completely to what became Mattermark. Danielle Morrill, Kevin Morrill, and Andy Sparks then launched Mattermark in mid-2013, raised additional angel rounds, and saw revenue growth each month of their subscription based product.

We initially invested in Mattermark in the fall through our FG Angels syndicate. We are psyched to now be major investors in Mattermark.

And, if you are looking for an epic job at the ground floor of a company in the bay area, there might be one for you.