Infosquire Business Description
Founded by Chris Crabtree in 2005, Infosquire was originally a data extraction company specializing in online retail and financial research. In 2007, the company re-incorporated as Mozenda, although the name was the not the only thing that changed. Since 2007 Mozenda has started focusing on the Web Oriented Architecture and offers Software as a Service for companies who need to add unstructured data to their stock of structured and semi-structured data. Mozenda also offers a web interface for users making it simple to acquire, analyze, utilize and publish the unstructured data.
Indsutry and Market
Infosquire is changing daily as the industry changes—the industry began with tools for web data extraction and has recently begun expanding to offer solutions for enterprise data utilization and data mashups. Infosquire/Mozenda targets all businesses that use the web to function, which is nearly all businesses nowadays. Businesses rely on web data to function with web data including everything—news, information, intelligence, product data, pricing comparisons, research, etc. The main target audience for Infosquire includes business users, IT professionals and web developers. Brett Haskins, CEO of Infosquire said, “Each use the Mozenda system in unique ways to acquire, consume and publish data.”
There are few companies that provide these solutions and only Infosquire/Mozenda is based on the Software as a Service business model.
Target web businesses and web-dependent businesses—Infosquire reaches out to all developers in the industry, whether they deal with IT, business or web developing.
Business Challenge/Objective
Haskins said the biggest challenges for Infosquire are hiring good talent, general company growth and administration and “developing at a pace fast enough to keep up with industry demand.” The company’s objective is to create a simple system on the web that business users and other targets can use to gather and make use of their own internal data and the unstructured data they get from the web.
FundingUniverse Strategy
The InfoSquire team was able to take advantage of several consulting sessions from FundingUniverse team members to help with their business plan and investor presentation. In addition, Haskins knew that going to FundingUniverse would help Infosquire network with the types of investors they needed to grow the company and become truly successful.
“Our strategy was to use FundingUniverse social events such as the speedpitching lunch to personally meet investors and pitch them on our business.”
Results
Haskins and the Infosquire team participated in the FundingUniverse speedpitching event in September 2007. The pitching event went well although the team received some mixed feedback from investors depending on how well they understood the technical ideas being presented. “We had several follow up invitations to present at monthly angel meetings and met with several local/regional VCs.”
The Infosquire team also learned that not every investor will be the right investor. “We learned quickly that not every investor was a good fit for what we were doing but the exposure you get from doing the speedpitching is absolutely critical to any start up company looking to raise capital.”
Infosquire Update
Since the speedpitching event in September, the company has had a steady growth process towards the public release of the new Software as a Service product, which is set to debut in June under the new company name, Mozenda.
Haskins reported that Infosquire closed Series A in March with two local investor groups.
“Since March we have transitioned all our existing customers over to our new web platform and have added 30 new customers to our platform.”