This startup tells you when companies try your competitors’ software — and it’s growing 25% a month

A tiny San Mateo startup that has taken no angel money, no venture capital, and no outside funding of any kind is growing at the torrid rate of 25 percent per month and luring away key employees from hot growing companies like KISSmetrics.

How? By offering you data you can’t get anywhere else.

Above: Datanyze founder and CEO Ilya Semin

Image Credit: LinkedIn

“I validated this via my team,” Datanyze cofounder Ben Sardella, who was recently running sales and customer success at KISSmetrics, told me today. “We started using Datanyze, and within two and a half months closed the largest deal in KISSmetrics’ history.”

Datanyze is like Google for sales and marketing.

Every day, the company crawls millions of websites with its custom spider technology, searching for hints about what software each company is using. In the era of cloud computing, few things are private, and anything on your website related to that marketing automation system you’re using or that CRM you’ve adopted or that e-commerce engine you installed reveals traces of what systems you’ve bought and what solutions you’re using. Bits of code, fragments of Javascript, embeds, even CSS markup could be the clue.

That’s powerful, and it’s similar to what Datanyze competitors HG Data and Salesify do right now. What Datanyze is particularly excited about, however, is that its data is updated every single day.

And that can give sales reps seeming superpowers.

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“Because we do this on a daily basis, we can see when people start a software trial,” CEO Ilya Semin told me. “So we can tell their competitors, and they can call those companies, and the sales rep can say: “I see you’re checking out our competitor’s solution right now … why don’t you try ours as well?”

That’s pure marketing magic.

Above: Datanyze data offers a unique insight into market share — in this case e-commerce engines.

Image Credit: Datanyze

Not only is the prospect clearly interested in the type of solution you’re offering, he or she is right in the buying cycle as well. And, since you know what solution they are currently testing and presumably have already built a comprehensive sales strategy against that competitor, it’s a fairly simple thing to make the case that, in the interests of covering all their bases, the prospect should give you a shot too. Instantly, you’re in the door.

“That’s our major differentiator,” Semin says.

Updating data every single day is unheard of in the traditional business data world, where data is often old and frequently outdated. Sardella told me about a $10,000 Data.com purchase that KISSmetrics made recently that turned out to be 80 percent inaccurate — causing the company to ask for a refund.

“Buying data is like driving a new car off the lot,” Sardella said. “The value drops 30 percent right away.”

Datanyze, however, says that its data keeps getting better every single day: fresher and fresher.

KISSmetrics is still a customer, as are HubSpot, the marketing automation vendor Act On, as well as many other well-known companies. One in particular, a leading video platform, has found the data so high quality it has increased its purchase from five seats late last year to “well over 100” today.

Enterprise customers can use the Datanyze API to bring data right into their systems, or use its Salesforce integration, with prices starting at $1,200 for the first seat and going down for subsequent users. Small customers can get platform access and CSV exports for $500 for the first seat, but Datanyze is also looking to offer a freemium product shortly.

While still small — the company will hit $1M in annual revenue “pretty soon” — Datanyze is growing fast.

“We’re really starting to grow,” Sardella says. “By the end of this month we will increase our total revenue by 25% just over one month.”

As the company grows, more options become available. Making the data richer, adding more categories to the 25 or more that it currently searches for, and adding more filtering are all on the table, marketing head Jon Hearty told me.

“We’re also asking ourselves how we can deliver this data in a way that is more seamless for salespeople,” he said. “We built a Chrome plugin for websites — because sales reps are constantly surfing the web for prospects — that gives you all the information in your browser … software they use, company size … and a link to dump it into Salesforce.”

Clearly, with HG Data and Salesify, among other competitors, the big data industry for sales and marketing leads is heating up.