Unomi

Gal Harzvi, a passionate B2B sales and marketing operator and co-founder of the technology holding company Valoshine Ventures, launched Unomi in early 2014. The company was built to help salespeople, not investors. In its first form, it was a broader tool for researching companies and industries, and it only narrowed into sales intelligence later.

The team spent about a year gathering the initial database and building the interface, then ran a beta pilot for about four months with a couple dozen companies. The first capital came roughly six months after launch. In year two the company tried a freemium model, which Harzvi said was not very successful. About 11 months before the interview, Unomi switched to annual subscriptions sold by an inside sales team with an enterprise approach.

The data engine combined the company's own web crawlers, which scan company websites, business directories, search engines and news sites, with licensed data from partners such as Crunchbase, Alexa and ZoomInfo. Machine learning and natural language processing then matched fragments into complete profiles.

In 2014 the company had no revenue, since it was focused on building the product. In 2015 revenue was a couple of tens of thousands of dollars, which host Nathan Latka estimated at about $30,000. Pricing started at $50 a month, moved to annual subscriptions around $3,000, and by the interview averaged about ten times that, or roughly $30,000 per year per customer.

The freemium model did not work, and the move to annual enterprise contracts did. Harzvi said net revenue churn was negative because upsells outweighed lost revenue, and the few customers who left usually did so because of poor initial fit or gaps in data coverage for certain territories. Unomi guarantees its leads: every contact is verified in real time, and any bounced email is fully credited back. Harzvi estimated customer lifetime value at around $50,000 and said the company was willing to spend about a third of that to acquire a customer, though it was spending much less in practice.

As of December 2016, Unomi had just over 100 customers and a database of about 7 million companies and 77 million business professionals, roughly 80% of them in the US. The team had 24 people across Israel, Miami and Boston, with a New York office planned. The company had raised $3.4 million from three investors through a seed round and convertible notes, and was preparing a Series A of around $5 to 6 million. Harzvi expected 2016 revenue in the low millions.