EverString picks up $12M to hire more data scientists to predict business leads

Business people can no longer dominate the marketing field. Nerds are taking over.

EverString employs neural network scientists and natural language processing scientists to build models for scoring leads and predicting who will be the best customers. Now it’s going to be able to recruit even more data scientists, thanks to the $12 million new funding it just announced today.

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So how does the technology work? EverString first puts software agents into customers’ CRM systems to get information about existing leads, basically their names and websites.

After that, EverString goes around the web to gather information about these companies. “We use natural language processing to crawl the web and convert the unstructured data into structured data,” said EverString’s CEO Vincent Yang, in an interview with VentureBeat.

EverString “track[s] 10,000+ indicators” to determine the characteristics of the existing customers, according to EverString’s website. Some of the indicators are employee size, company revenue, product offering, location, social status, technology, and management bio.

The next step is to use machine learning to build models based on the known good customers and bad customers from the clients. “In the machine learning space, we do our proprietary machine learning algorithms by Ph.Ds in neuroscience division at Stanford,” said Yang.

Once the profiles are built, EverString uses the profiles to score existing leads to help you prioritize. It also uses the profiles to find you new customers and generate new leads.

EverString uses a subscription based Software as a Service (SaaS) model. Its cloud is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

In terms of competition, another marketing technology startup 6Sense predicts leads based on data that come out of proprietary relationships with partners and publishers.

“There are a few companies that use Big Data to provide companies with lead scoring or to help identify new sales leads,” said Yang. “But many of them aren’t capable of processing the volume of structured and unstructured data that we do.”

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EverString’s current round is led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from existing investors including Sequoia Capital and IDG Ventures. Before this, EverString raised $1.65 million in a seed round from Sequoia Capital, IDG Ventures, and a few angel investors.

The company started in 2012. It’s headquartered in San Mateo, California. The company has 28 people right now and “is comprised mostly of neural network scientists, natural language processing scientists and distributed computing experts,” according to the company. EverString will use the new funding to hire more data scientists and enterprise sales people. It aims to double its number of employees in one year.