SCV is participating in $500,000 seed round in Cognism, a UK/Macedonian start-up and its state of the art solution that provides sales organisations with a more efficient and privacy compliant way to prospect customers. For SCV this is the first investment with a syndicate of international investors, which apart from Netcetera include Chinese Tsingbay Venture Capital, Tom James, James Hodson and others.
Lead generation, data enrichment, and targeting prospects require time, effort, and an ongoing investment. All too often, time and energy are 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, which 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.
Cognism is an end-to-end sales-acceleration solution that provides sales organizations with a more efficient way to prospect. Delivered as a software service (SaaS), with its unique data asset and compliance engine, Cognism is helping to enrich CRM records, stream leads into the funnel and is using artificial intelligence to surface opportunities and identify customer trends. Cognism is a pure AI sales technology company that generates prospect data at scale, cleaning and enriching it, and by that helps sales teams grow and scale across all levels of the sales process.
“We are excited to be able to assist Cognism to put its automated machine learning algorithms to good use and help its customers generate better leads and achieve better sales and business results. The feedback from the first users of the solution is very encouraging, and I strongly believe this seed round will help the team achieve great results. Cognism’s team is truly international, and the same is true for a syndicate of investors. We are looking forward to working with Netcetera and other investors to enable Cognism to realize their ambitious plans,” said Tatjana Zabasu, Partner, South Central Ventures.
Based in London, England and Skopje, Macedonia, Cognism was founded by James Isilay and Stjepan Buljat. Cognism is backed by Netcetera, 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. I am also personally looking forward to assist Cognism’s founder James and his team in achieving this mission together with South Central Ventures and our other international co-investors,” stated Darko Butina, Chief Investment Officer of Zurich, Switzerland based Netcetera.