New funding: Web monitoring service Visualping has raised a second $6 million seed round. In March, the startup raised $2 million. Total funding for the Vancouver, B.C.-based company, which launched in 2017, is now $8.5 million. It expects to exceed 2 million users this fall.
Ramping up business: Visualping searches online content and notifies users when there are changes on sites. The service got a bump in the past year when people were hunting for COVID-19 vaccines. Other consumer uses include searches for home and job listings, and monitoring social media.
Businesses use it for surveying competitors, watching for changes in laws and trading applications, news gathering, tracking contacts for sales, and web database maintenance. The startup is focusing more attention on business services and in the fall plans to launch Visualping for Business, which will include expanded enterprise customer service; team and collaboration tools; and other new features.
The company just released a tool to train its system to better recognize online changes. When Visualping users receive an email notification alerting them of new content, they will be able to click and rank the quality of the alert, allowing the company to fine-tune its results using machine learning.
Investors: Funding was led by Fuse, a Seattle fund that spun off of Ignition Partners last year and itself recently raised $120 million. Previous investors Mistral Ventures and N49P participated in Visualping’s new round.
The capital will help pay for the business-focused tools as well as sales and marketing.
The team: CEO and founder Serge Salager previously launched RetargetLinks and spent more than a decade in marketing and product development for Procter & Gamble in Switzerland.
Visualping’s Chief Technologist Xavier Raffin worked for Amazon Web Services (AWS). Martin Lopatka is head of data science, and formerly led a machine learning team at Mozilla. Gideon Lin recently joined as head of partnerships and business development.
Visualping has 20 employees and hopes to double that number by the end of the year.
