Tarci secures capital for AI designed to spot SME business leads

While small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are the mainstay of the economy, generating up to 44% of business in the United States alone, it can be difficult for sales teams to get a true picture of them. Indeed, they are often too small to be monitored by data providers and, more often than not, are stretched. A recent Gartner survey showed that SMB buyers only spend 17% of their time talking to suppliers, making it difficult to conquer SMB markets.

Leetal Gruper sought to simplify things with Leadgence, a startup that collects and analyzes publicly available data on SMBs to generate insights for business teams. Renamed Tarci today to coincide with the close of a $17 million Series A round, the company provides real-time updates on SMBs, including ownership changes, negative customer reviews and business growth.

"Tarci was founded in 2019 by Sergey Bahchissaraitsev and I. We teamed up to create a solution that would aggregate the huge amount of publicly available data and, most importantly, use AI to understand the signals that deserved attention. action," Gruper told TechCrunch. in an email interview. Gruper was previously a senior consultant at Bain and head of sales and loyalty at Worldpay, while Bahchissaraitsev was a data engineer at app monetization platform Supersonic and co-founder of several startups including online recruiting tool Emerald.

Gruper states that Tarci uses natural language processing algorithms to make sense of structured data (i.e. data in a predictable format) and unstructured data (data that does not correspond to a predefined convention) on SMEs from various sources on the Internet. The data collected by the platform is used to train AI systems tailored to the particular sectors occupied by SMEs, which generates insights into SMEs.

Gruper gave an example. When a restaurant plans to open a new location or a manufacturer starts exporting to a new country, they usually don't make an official announcement, she explained. Instead, they will leave "breadcrumbs" in the normal course of business, such as a regulatory license application, job listings, or a "Coming Soon" announcement on their websites. Tarci's AI attempts to collect these breadcrumbs and compile them together, creating signals that the business is undergoing observable changes.

SMBs that would prefer this type of data not be collected by Tarci can opt out at any time, Gruper said.

Image Credits: Tarci

"Optimizing time is essential in the fast-paced world of small and medium-sized businesses... Inspired by the nocturnal and visually vivid tarsier primate, we give our customers the superpower to 'see in the dark' when others don't. can't," Gruper said. "In a sea of ​​very poor, outdated, and basic SME data, moving to a real-time, forward-looking view enables decision makers to use this information with their marketing, sales, credit, customer insight teams. customers and success.< /p>

Tarci's customers include Bluevine, Tipalti and Payoneer, as well as "leading" insurance companies and banks; Gruper sees the startup competing with traditional business intelligence providers like Dun & Bradstreet and Moody's Analytics. The difference, she says, is that Tarci's approach is real-time and mostly automated, reducing closing time.

Of course, it should be emphasized that Tarci is not the only sales tool powered by In...