InsightsOne Secures $4.3 Million in Series A Round of Funding Led by Norwest Venture Partners

Former Yahoo! Data & Analytics Pioneers Harness Big Data to Deliver Cloud-Based Predictive Analytics to Enterprises

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Mar 29, 2012, 07:00 ET

SANTA CLARA, Calif., March 29, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- InsightsOne, a pioneer in cloud-based predictive analytics solutions enabled by big data, today announced that it has closed a $4.3 million Series A round of venture financing. Norwest Venture Partners (NVP) led the round, and Promod Haque, managing partner at NVP, has joined InsightsOne's board of directors. The company will use this infusion of capital to grow its executive team and further invest in sales, marketing and product development to meet the demands of its growing early adopter customer base.

InsightsOne was founded by the team that built Yahoo!'s consumer data and analytics platform, which is recognized as one of the best in the industry, and the first platform to exploit the power of big data to increase consumer monetization and engagement. The team believed that the prospect of building a standalone cloud-based predictive analytic services company on big data was immense, and left Yahoo! to pursue this multi-billion dollar opportunity. While the top-10 Internet companies such as Google, Facebook, Amazon and Yahoo! have built such capabilities in-house, the InsightsOne team's mission is to make it possible for any company, and consumer marketers in particular, to gain similar resources and insights quickly with low risk and at a reasonable cost.

Today InsightsOne offers real-time precision targeting and marketing insights to consumer marketers so they can optimize the relevance and profitability of offers to consumers. Based on powerful, Hadoop-based micro-segmentation technology, InsightsOne extracts signals from social, mobile, unstructured and structured data to optimize offers delivered by email, mobile, in-app, social and web communications. This data is becoming increasingly valuable to consumer marketers who want to exploit the unprecedented power of big data to grow profits and increase consumer engagement.

"This round of funding validates our vision to enable mid to large B2C companies to leverage the power of big data at a low cost and exploit the power of cloud-based predictive analytics to increase profits. Consumer-facing companies are using InsightsOne's cloud-based predictive analytic services on big data via a subscription basis without having to make any upfront investments in hardware or software, and that is a huge advantage to them," said Waqar Hasan, founder and CEO, InsightsOne. "Promod Haque and the team at NVP have a strong track record in helping to build significant companies -- particularly in the big data and analytics sectors. We're looking forward to working with NVP as we invest further in our team and products and take our company to the next level."

Market research firm IDC released a new forecast that predicts the big data market is expected to grow from $3.2 billion in 2010 to $16.9 billion in 2015. While many companies talk about the promise of big data, InsightsOne has made unique technology breakthroughs built on top of Hadoop and NoSQL infrastructures to provide real-time micro-segmentation on big data.

"We are extremely impressed with the domain knowledge and track record of the InsightsOne team. InsightsOne spent years building a relevant, next-generation technology solution based on thorough customer feedback and testing with CXO's, versus spending time and money developing a platform and just hoping the customers will come. This is why the company has experienced such early traction in the market," said Promod Haque, managing partner, NVP. "InsightsOne is already delivering solutions to a number of Fortune-500 companies and increasing their profits by more than 20%. That is rare at this stage of a company's growth, and we believe InsightsOne has an enormous opportunity ahead as this layer of the big data stack is still a hugely untapped market."

In addition to NVP, investors in the Series A financing include Gaurav Garg, private investor and Special Limited Partner, Sequoia Capital; Zod Nazem, Former CTO of Yahoo!, and Peter Wagner, Founder/Partner at Alpha Venturi and former general partner at Accel Partners.

About Norwest Venture Partners (NVP)

Norwest Venture Partners (NVP) is a global venture and growth equity investment firm that manages more than $3.7 billion in capital. Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, NVP has subsidiaries in Mumbai and Bengaluru, India and Herzelia, Israel and Hong Kong. NVP makes early to late stage venture and growth equity investments across a wide range of sectors including: information technology, business services, financial services, infrastructure, technology enabled services and consumer. NVP has actively partnered with entrepreneurs to build great businesses for more than 50 years and has funded over 500 companies since inception. For more information visit: www.nvp.com.

About InsightsOne

InsightsOne is a pioneer in cloud-based predictive analytics solutions enabled by big data. The company was founded by the team that built Yahoo!'s consumer data and analytics platform, which is recognized as one of the best in the industry, and the first platform to exploit the power of big data to increase consumer monetization and engagement. InsightsOne offers real-time precision targeting and marketing insights to consumer marketers so they can optimize the relevance and profitability of offers to consumers. Based on powerful, Hadoop-based micro-segmentation technology, InsightsOne extracts signals from social, mobile, unstructured and structured data to optimize offers delivered by email, mobile, in-app, social and web communications. This data is becoming increasingly valuable to consumer marketers who want to exploit the unprecedented power of big data to grow profits and increase consumer engagement. InsightsOne is funded by Norwest Venture Partners and is based in Santa Clara, Calif. For more information visit www.insightsone.com.

SOURCE Norwest Venture Partners