CB Insights raises $10M and launches a bot for making email introductions

CB Insights, a company that offers access to reports and data on privately held companies and venture capital investments, has an announcement of its own today — an initial $10 million round of institutional funding.

Public companies, investors, and even media outlets pay for CB Insights’ work — the company counts 325 customers, including Cisco, Gartner, Microsoft, and New Enterprise Associates. And CB Insights is profitable.

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The new money is arriving as CB Insights expands with new services, including a bot that figures out who customers should get to know and then sends out email introductions.

That might sound like a somewhat random product, but customers have often come to the CB Insights team for recommendations on who they should get to know. Now, the company has automated those processes with a virtual assistant named Ava, according to a blog post from CB Insights cofounder and chief executive Anand Sanwal.

“Ava uses a number of signals — from board relationships and recent acquisitions to press releases and blog posts — about an individual and their firm to build a professional interest graph for each individual. It then looks for others who have similar interests and then makes introductions,” Sanwal wrote.

CB Insights is also announcing today a predictive analytics tool that sales teams can use to figure out which companies they should pursue. And there’s a new company-rating scale that takes into consideration data from media reports, tweets, and the market in which a given company operates.

These additions could help CB Insights distinguish itself further from other private company research startups, including DataFox, Mattermark, and Tracxn.

New York-based CB Insights started in 2008. The company announced a $1.15 million grant from the National Science Foundation earlier this year. RSTP provided the new funding.

CB Insights has 61 employees, and it will have around 100-120 a year from now, Sanwal told VentureBeat in an email.