B2B information. The California-based Owler, which claims to be “the world’s largest community-based competitive insights platform and private company database” and which had already raised $19.3m, has secured (as yet undisclosed) further funding from Morningstar boss Joe Mansueto, and existing investors, Norwest Venture and Trinity Ventures. Owler, which was launched in 2011 as InfoArmy, began as a crowd-sourcing model where two-person home-working research teams would compile a report on each company for subscribers paying $99 a year. Two years later, it relaunched as Owler, with a completely different business model. It now offers a free mobile and online platform on company information for “members” who, having chosen to follow a set of companies, receive a personalised newsfeed and daily email. The Owler app covers trigger corporate events (i.e. funding events, leadership changes), company news and a community-driven Competitive Relationship Graph. It seeks to help business professionals uncover competitive stuff and discover new potential new rivals. The Owler “community” is said to comprise more than 1.5m members who both receive and share information on companies. Its leading competitors are reportedly InsideView (started 2005) and DataFox (2013), both of which have also been able to attract successive funding. But Owler seems more friendly and collaborative than these out-and-out subscription services. Owler’s ability to raise a total of, presumably, more than $20m in the past seven years, confirms the confidence that some smart investors have in a company which is said only to have revenue of some $3m. But its strategy is to engage free ‘subscribers’ with plenty of useful snippets and day-to-day information on the companies in which they are interested, in the hope of getting them to buy the high-value reports when the need arises. The company seems to be a natural extension of the highly-successful 20-year-old GLG (formerly Gerson Lehrman Group, which employs 1,700 people worldwide). GLG self-describes as “a learning membership connecting businesspeople trying to solve problems to experts that can solve them.” We guess that nobody jokes about what the word ‘owler’ meant in historic England. It was another word for ‘smuggler’.
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Owler raises more funding
