On January 14, Ocean.io, a B2B data platform, announced that it raised $7 million from Peak Investments and existing investors to build strong thought-leadership and expand its presence in current and new markets.
Ocean.io is a Copenhagen-based martech start-up that uses artificial intelligence to help enterprises identify lucrative business targets. As more and more businesses are adopting account-based marketing to grow their revenue. The start-up aims to make ABM intelligent and accurate for its customers by using artificial intelligence and data collected from over 300 million web pages, public databases, and company registries.
“Ocean.io’s machine learning algorithm uses a customer’s actual commercial performance data from their CRM to identify ideal customer profiles, and then searches for matching companies (in terms of work) in Ocean’s database,” Ocean.io CEO Michael Heiberg told Venturebeat. “The company populates this database using machine learning and natural language processing. It crawls hundreds of millions of web pages and synthesizes that data into a single, normalized dataset of the entire market.”
“Our competition makes you start with a blank sheet, and then return only what you ask for. Ocean.io also uses machine learning and natural language processing to identify similar companies, instead of generic industry codes. The result is exponentially more accurate industry categorization, making for zero-waste sales and marketing target lists. The traditional industry codes that our competition relies on to determine what a company actually does are too broad to be useful in the age of account-based marketing and ever-increasing expectations for personalization,” the CEO said.
The investment will facilitate Ocean.io to scale its go-to-market model and grow its presence in the United States and Europe. Its revenue grew by seven times in 2021, and it plans to remain on the same trajectory in 2022. Its current revenue rate is $6 million.
“Our investors have seen the traction we are gaining, including a doubling of client numbers every two months. Every existing investor was involved in the latest funding round, showing the confidence in our capabilities and impact. This investment will help us to grow faster and help our customers as they grow exponentially within their markets,” Heiberg added.