Klue Picks Up $5 Million in New Funding

Klue has announced $5 million in new funding to help sales teams equip themselves with useful competitive intelligence.

The Vancouver-based company’s funding round was led by OMERS Ventures, along with BDC Venture Capital, Vancouver Founder Fund and SK Ventures. A few angel investors also kicked in funds, including the CEOs of Hootsuite and Helpful.

Collecting, curating and distributing competitive intelligence is a problem that a lot of large companies face, and Klue realized that it’s currently very painful to arm salespeople with relevant information they need to be better at their jobs. The company’s platform combines information from co-workers with bot-collected intel to create battle cards and dynamic dashboards that display competitor activity.

Battle card is an odd title, but Klue realizes sales can be a fight and you need every advantage you can get over your opponent. Klue helps product marketers keep competitive content up to date, as well as making sure salespeople find the content they need inside applications like Salesforce, Slack, their email and more and leverage it to gain an advantage.

“Thirty percent or more of deals are lost directly to a competitor. It stings to lose a deal that should have been won,” said Jason Smith, Klue’s co-founder. “Klue gives you a continuously updated lens into your competitors’ world so you can to better position your company against your rivals, improve your sales strategies with prospects, and ultimately close more deals.”

The idea behind Klue is to crack sales wide open by using machine learning to unearth insights that humans just cannot do themselves.

“By applying a machine learning intermediary to help scale down the volume of content, and giving enablement teams the tools to deliver, intel is less noisy, more succinct and ultimately more digestible for sales teams to run with,” said Sarathy Naicker, Klue’s other co-founder.

Klue collects millions of articles, posts, reviews and even website changes down to the pixel every day. This intel is turned into a battle card to keep a company informed on what kinds of changes are happening in the industry and to run along with the name, provide clues into what a competitor is planning for the future.