Radius takes $13M to spot great leads and add salespeople of its own

Not that long ago, Salesforce stood proud in its quest to challenge old-school software companies in storing sales leads for businesses. Today, more and more startups are offering products that makes Salesforce’s core software stronger, and investors love the idea of backing such startups.

Today, the beneficiary of the trend is the lead-generation startup Radius, which has scored $13 million. Formation8 Partners led the round. BlueRun Ventures and Radius chief executive, Darian Shirazi, also participated.

The thing is, several other startups want to improve workflows for salespeople, so now Radius needs to do more to stand out and sign up lots of customers.

San Francisco-based Radius tracks lots of different kinds of data on businesses and makes them available for its customers to search through, so they can find which ones to contact. Sources include social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter as well as updates to company websites and reviews of products and services.

The smart lists Radius whips up flow into the Salesforce customer-relationship management application for keeping on top of leads, so salespeople don’t have to switch back and forth. And if Radius customers don’t use Salesforce, Radius can export a simple spreadsheet.

The company announced $12.4 million in funding about a year ago.

The new funding will help Radius slurp in more data sources and also hire people to work on sales, technology, and data, according to a press release on the news.

Radius has now raised a total of $28 million. Its online customer list includes Home Depot, American Express, and TaskRabbit. It employs 40 people full-time, a spokeswoman said.

Bringing in more data has been a high priority at Radius for a while now.

Above: Darian Shirazi, Radius’ chief executive

Image Credit: Facebook

“We are trying to add as much data as we possibly can from all over the web to track the small business economy,” Shirazi, who was Facebook’s first intern, told VentureBeat in an interview last year.

But as Shirazi keeps trying to do that and gradually make work easier for salespeople, other startups with similar intentions have been pulling in venture funding, too. Just look at Infer, Futurelytics, and most recently, People Pattern. And at the same time, executives at Salesforce have been talking about doing more with data in its programs.

Which is why it makes sense for Radius to pulling in money to work on its own sales.