Datanetis, an Israeli based company that has been working quietly for past 4 years, announced a USD 6 million Series A funding round by Battery Ventures. As part of the launch, they got a new name Pursway and a nice website. According to Mass High Tech, Pursways has 30 people and was cash flow positive before the Series A funding. If that’s the case, a conservative estimate of their annual revenues would be around US 3 million, not bad for a bootstrapped company after 4 years.
Pursway’s new tagline is “stop marketing, start influencing”, and their new US headquarters will be in Waltham, MA. One city over from Sonamine. Perhaps Massachusetts will become a social network analysis hub just like it became a mobile advertising hub (ThirdScreenMedia, Enpocket, Quattro etc)
Pursway joins players like Xtract who are pioneering a brand new way to reach potential customers via influencers, thus challenging marketers to throw away years of accumulated knowledge and embrace influencer marketing. What is unique is that Pursway marketing solution uses actual retail purchase data to extract social network links to identify influencers. They gave a short presentation on this in Nov at a tradeshow (see post here on how). This allows Pursway to attack the retail space with a CRM extension on top of the retailer’s loyalty card information. CRM and retail systems vendors, take note!
Now what if you were only interested in finding influencers, but not willing to spend half-a-million dollars to do it? See a related post on finding influencers here on the cheap using SQL and Sonamine software.
