Grata Secures $3.2M Seed Round to Scale Small Business Search Engine
Led by Bling Capital, financing round to expand B2B SaaS platform and make every US company searchable
NEW YORK, Oct. 13, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Grata, the search engine for discovering small to middle market private companies, today announced it has secured $3.2 million in Seed funding to further its mission in helping business professionals discover companies instantly, facilitating business development across industries. The financing round was led by Bling Capital with participation from Accomplice and Alumni Ventures Group, along with former executives from Goldman Sachs, American Express, and Citi, and other advisors.
Since launching in 2016, Harvard classmates Andrew Bocskocsky and Nevin Raj bootstrapped Grata to well over 100 customers. To date, business development professionals across private equity, investment banking, and recruiting have transacted over $1B with companies they've found through Grata. The company will use the new capital to scale its proprietary search engine technology, accelerate product development, and grow its engineering and sales functions, including doubling its employee count in the U.S.
Ben Ling, Founding General Partner at Bling Capital said, "Reaching and selling to SMBs is a major business challenge. Grata's mission is to identify and enable access to every U.S. business, which will fundamentally change business development and open doors for companies selling products and services to SMBs."
Small businesses are the lifeblood of the modern U.S. economy. With nearly 45 percent of economic activity driven by the middle market, small to mid-sized companies present a huge opportunity across countless industries. However, for most business professionals, this segment remains largely untapped, as access to proper search tools has been limited and traditional databases have been unable to crack the holy grail: scale (the number of companies covered), depth, accuracy, and cost. Leveraging proprietary Natural Language Processing (NLP) and web crawling technology, Grata solves these challenges by offering a fully automated platform that removes the need for hours of manual research, creating positive financial opportunities in an underinvested segment of the economy that has been especially hit hard by COVID-19.
"A few years from now, using Grata to find companies will be like using Yelp to find good restaurants," said Andrew Bocskocsky CEO and Co-Founder of Grata. "At Grata, we are excited to provide a single source of truth for company discovery, solving the problem of the subjective and incomplete information that exists today. We have innovated the latest NLP models and worked with the world's best talent to change the way online business information is captured."
With the funding, Grata will aggressively invest in its infrastructure to make every small to mid-sized private company in the U.S. searchable, including expanding its deep well of data to sources like job postings. The expansion enables business development professionals to find where companies are hiring and spending, opening an unparalleled opportunity for recruiters and other service providers.
"Grata removes the friction in finding private companies," said Tyler Zhang, Head of Enterprise Strategy and Analytics at One Medical. "Instead of spending countless hours sifting through databases and websites, we can find the information we need on middle market companies through Grata. This has been essential for us to expand our reach and deliver care in today's fast moving market."
About Grata
Grata is the first search engine for company discovery, providing a single source of truth to find small to middle market private companies. The next-generation SaaS platform automates the B2B research process on the 30 million businesses in the U.S., helping business development professionals across private equity, banking and recruiting discover companies instantly. Grata indexes billions of sources on the web and has innovated the latest NLP technology. Over 100 customers have transacted over $1 billion dollars with companies they've found through Grata.
Founded in 2016 in New York City, Grata was built and bootstrapped by two Harvard graduates who found themselves in need of a B2B search engine that didn't exist in the marketplace through their work as consultants and investors. Visit www.gratadata.com for more.
About Bling Capital
Bling Capital is an early stage venture capital firm, focused on helping entrepreneurs find product market fit. Bling Capital offers a unique Product Council of 100+ top executives as resources to its portfolio companies. Bling Capital is founded by Benjamin Ling, a former executive at Google, Facebook, and YouTube. Ling has made over 100 early stage investments, including Square, AirTable, Udemy, PagerDuty, Lyft, and Quora among others. www.blingcap.com
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