Shane Wey and Jason Lew want to help salespeople better target potential new customers, and now they have some financial backing to do so.
The MightySignal co-founders have raised a $1.2 million seed round led by Draper Associates. Also participating in the round is Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital, Nas’ Queensbridge Venture Partners, and handful of Seattle-area investors like Andy Sack, Aaron Bird, T.A. McCann, Andy Rebele, Gary Rubens, and others.
MightySignal, a graduate of the most recent Techstars Seattle class, has developed software that tells sales teams who to sell to by crawling the web and analyzing which customers are most likely to buy a specific service or product.
“Every sales team is trying to figure out who they need to sell to, and they do it in very archaic ways,” Wey told GeekWire.
Wey said that most salespeople will “surf the web and buy email lists” when trying to find new customers. MightySignal, meanwhile, offers a tool that automates the manual work and pinpoints new clients based on parameters set by users and related data online.
After participating in the Techstars Seattle program last fall, Wey and Lew — who are childhood friends — have moved back to their hometown of San Francisco, where they share an apartment. Wey said the move was strictly for personal reasons, as the founders both have family in the Bay Area, but added that the experience in Seattle was “awesome.”
“We made deep connections and friendships, and obviously people believed in us,” he said. “We’ll be back to Seattle often.”
Wey and Lew met on their sixth-grade basketball team and both graduated from Homestead High School, which also happens to be the alma mater of Steve Wozniak and the late Steve Jobs. MightySignal isn’t the duo’s first endeavor, as Wey and Lew also created Melt, an app that lets people express thoughts in their own voice online. Melt still has an active community, but Wey and Lew are no longer involved.
Learn more about MightySignal with our Startup Spotlight.
