London/Macedonian-based start-up Cognism has secured $500,000 in seed investment to fund the development of its state-of-the-art solution that provides sales organisations with a more efficient and privacy compliant way to prospect customers. The round, which was led by us, will be used to scale the Cognism team and further develop its core solution. Several other institutional and angel investors participated in the round, including SC Ventures, Tsingbay Venture Capital, Tom James, James Hodson, Usman Khan and others.

“Raising this round was an important step for us,” said James Isilay, CEO, Cognism. “In the months ahead, we’ll be investing heavily in the product itself to move toward a frictionless customer experience, expand our ability to collect and reason about data at scale, rapidly grow our data asset through strategic partnerships, and introduce Cognism to more sales and marketing teams.”

“We are excited to support Cognism on its mission to boost their customers’ sales with their impressive tech solution for delivering the right leads at the right time. This investment also marks an important milestone for Netcetera, because it presents our first official investment from our start-up initiative, which we launched in the beginning of 2016,” stated Andrej Vckovski, CEO of Netcetera. He also added: “James and his team are also a brilliant example, how a founder from Switzerland (James lives in Zurich) can build a great start-up with CTO from Croatia (CTO Stjepan is from Zadar), development from Macedonia (the team is based in Skopje) and sales in UK (London). And to top it off, we are leading the investment of truly international set of select co-investors – from China to Macedonia, from Switzerland to UK.”

Lead generation, data enrichment, and targeting prospects requires time, effort, and an ongoing investment. All too often, time and energy is spent on this phase of the sales process, rather than on closing deals. Data protection and legal restrictions on customer outreach are also rapidly evolving, this further challenges the ability of sales teams to connect with customers. To assist the sales cycle, many companies, especially those with limited resources, are turning to automated sales-acceleration technology to improve the prospecting process and ensure outreach compliance in the target market.

“Our technology is built around automated machine learning algorithms that enable us to generate better lead data, custom fitted to our customers.” said Stjepan Buljat, CTO, Cognism. “We’re tapping sources of information that cannot be processed by a human workforce in real-time”.