DataFox Brings Big Data Analytics to the Business of Investing

PALO ALTO, Calif., Feb. 5, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- DataFox Intelligence, Inc., the premier source of data-driven technology solutions for finance professionals, today announced the launch of its flagship enterprise product, DataFox (www.DataFox.co). Designed for investors and analysts from financial institutions, corporations, and governments, the subscription software aggregates and makes sense of millions of data points to track, score, and rank over 350,000 private and public companies, allowing users to discover new investment opportunities, maintain a real-time understanding of prospective and current portfolio companies, and identify industry trends and patterns.

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DataFox sheds unprecedented light on the closed world of private companies. By gathering and scoring the wealth of available information from companies' online and offline footprints, the platform allows users to bypass a tradition of financial secrecy to develop a new depth of company insight. DataFox makes sense of vast swathes of available data on hiring, leadership changes, product releases, web traffic, social media traction, and beyond to reveal the true story of a company's health and growth trajectory, independent of financial information. In the absence of reliable revenue estimates, DataFox can now alert subscribers on specific leading indicators, such as when a company's sales force doubles, when a CFO with IPO experience is hired, or when customer sentiments trend upwards. A proprietary scoring system ranks companies and immediately generates a list of closest competitors. And thanks to filtering and search tools, users can discover leads across industries, geographic regions, or other market segments or develop sophisticated insight into a custom-defined grouping.

"DataFox is a direct response to the currently broken approach to researching private companies for investment, which, in a nutshell, is time-consuming, antiquated and hugely inefficient. Talented people and teams are spending their days scouring information sources, creating clunky spreadsheets, and trying to keep up with important updates manually. As a former investment analyst, I've experienced this firsthand," said DataFox Intelligence CEO Bastiaan Janmaat. "DataFox has built a modern-day solution. It makes sense of a wealth of data through intelligent algorithms, and allows users to collect clear, actionable buckets of information for unprecedented insight. Basically, DataFox is the analyst's analyst."

The DataFox platform empowers users to:

• Generate targeted lists to discover new companies and segments, to identify potential prospects or to develop an understanding of a competitive space.
• Deep dive into individual companies and receive email alerts about high-impact changes and milestones.
• Track trends within a single company or across a specific segment to identify growth potential and emerging opportunities.
• Create custom dashboards for ongoing oversight of specific competitive segments or tear sheets for individual companies.

With its valuable blend of advanced data technology and ease of user experience, DataFox raised its seed funding from Google Ventures; Ram Shriram, Google and Stanford board member; Jawed Karim, co-founder of YouTube; Jim Ellis, professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business; and top financial fund managers including John Hurley of Cavalry Asset Management.

"The financial services segment is ripe for innovation up and down its data analytics technology stack," said Google Ventures Partner Dave Munichiello. "With its deep technical talent and keen understanding of the financial services segment, the DataFox team is well positioned to help foster a new era of transparency in the world of private-company data."

DataFox's Co-Founders Bastiaan Janmaat, Mike Dorsey, and Alden Timme met while graduate students at Stanford University. CEO Janmaat came fresh from analyst roles in private equity and venture capital at Goldman Sachs and was working toward his MBA at Stanford, while Timme was earning degrees in Mathematical and Computational Sciences and Computer Science, with specializations in statistics, Natural Language Processing, and Artificial Intelligence. CPO Dorsey straddled both the financial and technical domains, with his MS and MBA degrees, a background designing business intelligence systems, and experience in Investment Banking. CTO Ben Trombley, who has a background as an early engineer and software architect at Box and Financial Engines, and holds a degree in computer science from Stanford, rounded out the founding team to create a shared vision for automating the most arduous aspects of a financial analyst's role.

DataFox's beta product is already being used in leading financial institutions, investment firms, and foundations, including Blackstone, Investcorp, and Stanford University.

For more information on DataFox, including pricing, or to subscribe visit www.DataFox.co.

About DataFox
DataFox (www.datafox.co) is the premier source of insights about private company performance and growth prospects. Working from its custom database of companies that meet specific criteria for growth and investing, the platform's analytics engine augments intelligence from millions of data-points to track, score, and rank more than 350,000 companies, allowing financial institutions, corporations, and governments to make more informed decisions. The founders are from Stanford and worked previously at Goldman Sachs, Cisco, Counsyl, and Box. DataFox is backed by Google Ventures and is currently in use at top organizations such as Blackstone, Investcorp, and Stanford University.

Contact:
Mark Ballard
Channel V Media
[email protected]
212.680.0179

SOURCE DataFox Intelligence, Inc.