KOCHI: Kerala's nascent startup industry got a big boost on Tuesday after US-based FullContact announced the acquisition of Profoundis, incubated at the Startup Village in 2012 and emerged as a successful firm providing technology enabled human verified data research platform. This is the first-of-its-kind acquisition in Kerala’s startup community.
Funded by a group of angel investors since mid-2015, Profoundis was founded by a group of enterprising technology professionals who were batch-mates at the College of Engineering, Chengannur, Kerala. Profoundis was the first company from Kerala to get selected to the Microsoft Ventures Accelerator programme, one of the three companies to get selected for ‘Start-Up Chile’, an initiative by the Chilean Government in 2013.
FullContact’s purchase of Profoundis follows $25 million in new funding, which the company will use to accelerate its growth, recruit global talent and fund further acquisitions.
“Our goal is to be the smartest, most comprehensive, and most up-to-date address book on the planet.” said Scott Brave, CTO, FullContact. “The only way to truly achieve that is by integrating the best of human intelligence with machine intelligence. Profoundis is a key element of that strategy.”
FullContact will integrate all of Profoundis’ 70 employees, most of whom will remain in Kochi, into its global workforce and add human-based data research to its growing list of capabilities supporting its strategy for expansion and rapid growth. This combination will establish FullContact as a market leader in data quality and data breadth across its contact management solutions for individual professionals and businesses and have a direct impact on the company’s revenue and sales.
“As a strategic partner, Profoundis has been instrumental to adding value and increasing the effectiveness of our data solutions for our clients,” said Bart Lorang, co-founder and CEO of FullContact. “Together we can further accelerate the growth of FullContact as we continue to build the most powerful fully-connected contact management platform for professionals and businesses.”
The deal amount was not disclosed.