FullContact, a US-based provider of contact management platform, announced the acquisition of Profoundis, a Startup Village (SV)-based provider of technology enabled human verified data research platform. This is the first-of-its-kind acquisition in Kerala’s start-up community.

FullContact’s purchase of Profoundis follows $25 million in new funding, which the company will use to accelerate its growth, recruit global talent and fund further acquisitions.

Profoundis was founded by four engineers in 2012, and after bootstrapping for three years, the company raised their first round in mid-2015. By combining technology algorithms with human oversight, Profoundis was able to balance the scale and accuracy of data, making them one of the best data providers in the world. Vibe, built by the company in 2014, helps sales and recruiting professionals to do their prospect research.

FullContact will integrate all of Profoundis’ 70 employees, most of whom will remain in Kochi, into its global workforce and add human-based data research to its growing list of capabilities, supporting its strategy for expansion and rapid growth. This combination will establish FullContact as a market leader in data quality and data breadth across its contact management solutions for individual professionals and businesses, and have a direct impact on the company’s revenue and sales, company sources said.

“Our goal is to be the smartest, most comprehensive and most up-to-date address book on the planet,” said Scott Brave, CTO, FullContact. “The only way to truly achieve that is by integrating the best of human intelligence with machine intelligence. Profoundis is a key element of that strategy.”

“With Profoundis, we were on a mission to help businesses do better by providing additional contextual data about organisations and people,” said Arjun R Pillai, Co-Founder and CEO of Profoundis, who will be FullContact’s Head of Data Strategy. “Becoming part of the FullContact team allows us to further execute on this mission globally, and together, our users will benefit by having more detailed information about their contacts, allowing them to be even more awesome with people.”

“The acquisition of Profoundis marks a key milestone for Kerala and its start-up community,” said Keyur Patel, Chairman of Profoundis and Founder, Chairman of Fuse Global. “It also indicates the growing maturity of start-up teams in the enterprise space and showcases the global cultural and technological synergies that are evolving. FullContact is the fastest-emerging player in the contact-management space and picking Profoundis to become part of its growth clearly shows the value each company can derive over the coming years at a global scale.”

Source: The Financial Express