Competitor Tracking Firm Crayon Raises Growth Funds

In the US, competitor intelligence specialist Crayon has raised $3.35m in seed funding, which it will use to speed up business growth, including recruitment of new staff in engineering, product, marketing and sales.

Founded in 2014 by John Osborne and Jonah Lopin, Crayon tracks 117 million web pages across 7.4 million domains spanning 2.3m companies, and uses a variety of machine learning techniques to produce data about what is happening in clients' markets, with competitors, customers and partners. Users access a dashboard covering more than 100 categories, including pricing changes, messaging and positioning changes, new product launches and online reviews.

The firm's funding round was led by Midas List investors Eric Paley at Founder Collective, and Steve Anderson, founder at Baseline Ventures. BoxGroup is also a new investor, and previous backer Converge Venture Partners participated in the round, along with a group of angel investors. Maia Heymann, GP at Converge, comments: 'The ability to gather competitive intelligence is a necessity in today's business climate and the market for AI enabled solutions like Crayon is therefore extremely large. The business momentum that Jonah and his team have built in a very short period of time underscores the value that Crayon creates for its clients'.

Web site: www.crayon.co .