While small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are a stronghold of the economy, driving as much as 44% of activity in the U.S., it’s hard for sales teams to get an accurate picture of them. This is because they are often too small for data providers to track and – often – thin. A recent Gartner study found that SMB buyers spend only 17% of their time talking to salespeople, making winning business for SMBs a challenge.
Leadence, a startup that collects and analyzes publicly available data on SMBs, wanted to make it easier for Leetal Gruper to create insights for sales teams. Branding itself Tarci today to close a $17 million Series A round, the company provides real-time updates on SMBs, including ownership changes, negative customer reviews and company growth.
“Tarchy was founded in 2019 by Sergey Bakhchisaritesev and I. We partnered to create a solution that uses AI to integrate vast public data and, most importantly, understand actionable signals,” Grouper told TechCrush in an email. Interview Grouper Previously a senior consultant at Bain and head of sales and retention at WorldPay, Bakhchisaritesev was a data engineer at app monetization platform Supersonic and co-founder of several startups, including online recruiting tool Emeraldo.
Grouper says Tarsi uses natural language processing algorithms to generate structured data (ie, in a predictable format) and unstructured data (data that doesn’t fit a predefined convention) about SMBs from various Internet sources. Data collected by the platform is used to train AI systems tailored to the specific industries in which SMBs operate, providing insights about SMBs.
Grouper gave an example. When a restaurant plans to open a new location or a manufacturer begins shipping to a new country, they typically don’t give formal notice, she explained. Instead, they leave things like “breadcrumbs” on their website as part of the normal course of business, such as regulatory approval applications, job board listings, or ‘coming soon’ ads. Tarci’s AI tries to collect these breadcrumbs and put them together, creating signs that the company is making some visible change.
SMBs who prefer to have such information scraped by Tarci can opt out at any time, Grouper said.
Image Credits: Tarsi
“In the fast-paced world of small and medium-sized businesses, maximizing time is essential… Inspired by the nocturnal, visually curious tarsier primate, we give our clients the superpower to see ‘in the dark’ when others can’t.” Gruper said. “In a sea of poor, out-of-date and basic information about SMBs, moving to a real-time, forward-looking view allows decision makers to leverage this information across marketing, sales, credit, your customer and their success teams.
Tarsi’s clients include BlueVin, Tipalti and Pioneer, as well as “leading” insurance companies and banks. Grouper sees the startup competing against traditional sales data providers such as Dunn & Bradstreet and Moody’s Analytics. The difference, she argues, is that Tarsi’s approach is real-time and largely automated, significantly reducing shutdown time.
Of course, it should be pointed out that Tarsi isn’t the only AI-powered sales tool vendor going after the SMB space. There’s Apollo, an all-in-one sales enablement platform for finding prospects from a database of hundreds of millions of buyers. Lusha hosts a similarly crowded database of sales professionals and sales organizations, while platforms like Crunchbase are building intelligence on their buyer data sets.
Grouper Tarsi will continue to differentiate itself by building new products, strengthening existing information capabilities and expanding into new industries.
“Ultimately, we’re building a new solution that helps SMBs and companies that sell to SMBs succeed,” she said. Given the broader economic slowdown, companies need to be more careful about spending than ever before. Tarci provides a solution that produces cost-effective results. Our existing customers are starting to turn to us for new issues like wrinkle reduction – SMBs are breaking down and creating congestion – and existing customers are turning to us for new issues like monitoring for real risk purposes.
Sound Ventures led Tarci’s Series A with participation from Liberty Mutual Strategic Ventures, Global Founders Capital and an unnamed strategic investor. The company has about 30 employees in Israel, the US and the UK (Tarsi is based in New York) and is actively hiring, Grouper says.
Reached for comment, Sound Ventures managing partner Effie Epstein added in a statement: “There are more than 54 million SMBs in the US and Europe, and they collectively spend $1.2 trillion on technology, financial services and insurance. SMBs represent a large market, but the unit economics of enterprises selling to SMBs are often poor, driven by high customer acquisition costs and low lifetime value. Tarci’s … engine provides enterprises with real-time actionable data, enabling them to more effectively market, sell and retain customers, thereby improving underlying unit economics.
