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Platform That Pinpoints Potential Clients Using AI
One of the main challenges of the sales teams is customer acquisition in minimal time, but so far, a lot of time is spent on prospecting and negotiation, without having precise indicators whether a deal can be made. The startup Vainu showed that traditional sales prospecting is inefficient and they transformed the disorganised open and big data into a platform containing insightful leads, so companies can focus on clients most likely to convert.
Two of the founders, Mikko Honkanen and Pietari Suvanto previously held managing positions at Meltwater Drive, when in 2013 they partnered with Tuomas Rasila who owns another company and established Vainu. Vainu is currently operations from several offices in Helsinki Tampere, Stockholm, Oslo, Amsterdam, Rotterdam and New York.
Vainu was recognized as “Best Bootstrapped Startup” both in Finland and on the Nordic level last year and were also chosen as the best B2B sales tool in Sweden.
Flipping Traditional Databases into Smart Lead Generation
Vainu’s platform is a sales intelligence, prospecting and account insights platform with a database of over 100 million companies and it’s one of the fastest growing SaaS companies coming from the Nordics with over 12,000 users and over 1,800 clients.
Since it is based on machine learning, the platform can identify key financial figures out of PDFs/images, figure out organisational structures, and extract information about the company from media and press releases etc. Basically, it is a combination of (traditional) company database with open and big data which the AI-driven software collects on an ongoing basis creating potential leads.
The product’s advantages are that our database relies on business IDs instead of the traditional domain data (which our US competitors are doing) which enables pinpointing information to a certain company and do advanced analysis on them. Our software collects information automatically on an ongoing basis and isn’t reliant on people calling to company decision makers. It also uses advanced NER and textual analysis so our solution understands the content of news and web pages. Say the founders.
Intensive AI Application in SaaS as Companies Request Detailed Customer Insight
Vainu’s main target are organisations doing active B2B sales or account-based marketing. Some of Vainu’s competitors include Datanyze, Discover.org, ZoomInfo, but Vainu’s advantage is the utilisation of AI and machine learning in identifying leads and the automation of data collection.
According to a research from Gartner, the CRM software market became the largest software market globally in 2017, with a revenue of $39.5 billion, with the trend of growth continuing in the following years by 16%. The main market driver is the companies’ need for a detailed insight into their potential and current customers which also leads to more intensive application of AI in CRM software. Statista, on the other hand, states that in 2016, the CRM software market was valued at $24.3 billion globally and projects its growth to $26.6 billion in 2021.
Since Vainu’s solution is also SaaS, it is relevant to point out that, according to FinancesOnline, the projected growth of the SaaS market is $76 billion by 2020 and more leading tech companies like Microsoft and IBM are changing their acquisition strategies with the use of SaaS.
As a partner of Nordic Startup Awards, Valuer.ai has produced content decks about all nominees. Who is Valuer.ai? The Danish company is specialized in finding the perfect matching startups for corporate companies.
