RepIQ, a tool for sales reps from YCharts’ founder, launches with $1.1M in funding
RepIQ, a platform that aims to give sales reps better leads, announced Tuesday that it’s publicly launching after closing a $1.1 million seed funding round.
Founded in 2016 by Shawn Carpenter ⇒, a serial entrepreneur, and Jonathan Suchland, a former Amazon software development manager, Chicago-based RepIQ crawls the internet to create a database of more than 1 million companies salespeople can tap into, then suggests the best leads to reps.
In addition to advanced search tools and detailed contact information, which users can download in bulk for a subscription fee, RepIQ offers a free Chrome browser extension equipped with email tracking and analytics.
“We really set out to make it much easier for sales teams to find their best customers and who they should be targeting,” Carpenter said. “The information they need is all over the web and in a lot of disparate places.”
RepIQ will join the Salesforce app exchange, he said.
Before co-founding RepIQ, Carpenter founded financial services company YCharts. Before that, he launched investment portal WallStreetView back in the “dot-com craze,” he said. It was at YCharts where Carpenter experienced firsthand how difficult it could be to compile and act on sales data, he said.
B2B salespeople using the RepIQ platform to connect with potential customers can search its database and filter by business category and market location. Results can be further broken down by additional filters, too, including the specific software that a company uses.
“Let’s say that you get 5,000 results,” Carpenter said. “Then the next step might be to say, ‘let’s pick the role that we’re targeting,’ because maybe you want to only reach a CEO or the (vice president) of sales or maybe an inside-sales manager.”
It’s free to sign up for RepIQ’s basic search tools. Beyond that, the entry-level subscription fee gives access to 30 users within a sales team and costs a total of $500 a month. The more data users download, the more expensive the subscription ultimately becomes, Carpenter said.
RepIQ’s early backers have included local investment firms Pritzker Group Venture Capital, Amicus Capital and Hyde Park Angels. San Francisco-based seed investment group Arba is also among RepIQ’s funders. The company previously announced it had raised some seed funding last September, but at the time would not say how much; Carpenter said the company landed “a lot more money” for the round after that announcement.
It currently has seven employees, Carpenter said.
About 2,000 users have been using RepIQ for free as part of a beta testing period. Its competitors include ZoomInfo and DiscoverOrg.
Read more at the Chicago Tribune