This article was originally published by TechCrunch on December 8, 2021.
Everyday business decisions require data and are often questions someone has already asked and had answered. However, where all of that knowledge lives is not always accessible if you aren’t in research or have a panel of experts. NewtonX wants to change that.
The business-to-business insights company on Wednesday announced $32 million in Series B funding to continue developing its tool aimed at democratizing access to high-quality data and research.
The round was led by Marbruck Ventures and included Level One, the UBS O’Connor fund, Gaingels and Heliad Partners. Existing investors Two Sigma, Third Prime, XFund, Story Ventures and Switch also participated. The latest investment gives NewtonX a total amount raised of $47 million.
We profiled the company back in 2019 when it announced a $12 million Series A round, but the premise behind the company is that it developed search engine technology to match questions to only those who would know the answer among an open network of more than 1 billion professionals. It also ensures every professional is verified so there is true expertise.
Sascha Eder, co-founder and CEO of NewtonX told TechCrunch that the company was very close to the path of profitability, but decided to take on the new capital to prioritize growth. It used the Series A funding to invest in technology, and now wants to take that technology to the next level, bringing in automation and artificial intelligence, so that answers will come faster, thus transforming into an enterprise scalable-grade company to handle any future growth.
At the beginning of the year, the company also built out its marketing and sales teams for more brand awareness and partnerships. A big part of the Series B will go even deeper to build out a product suite, which will require additional marketing, sales and engineering hires, Eder said.
“For the first four years of our company, we didn’t have a sales team, which is different from other startups, but we can say we had a product market first from day one,” he added. “We provided the right solutions and a lot of organic growth, and now it is time to take that to the next level with a strategic approach to awareness and expansion globally.”
NewtonX works with more than 200 companies, like Pinterest, and Fortune 500 consulting firms, financial institutions, market research firms and mid-sized companies. The company is growing 100% year over year and has plans to grow from 80 employees today to over 300 by the end of 2022, Eder said. It had been at 45 employees around this time last year.
Even venture capitalists need access to insights, an additional reason that made the company attractive, Kemper Shaw at Marbruck Ventures said in a written statement.
“In just five years NewtonX has established itself as the leader in B2B research and is used by the world’s leading companies that trust NewtonX to get the data they need to make multi-million dollar decisions,” Shaw said. “Their knowledge graph and custom recruiting automation allows them to connect business leaders to insights they previously could not access or where they had to question the validity of the data, NewtonX solved this problem and will be a critical part of companies’ competitive edge in the years to come.”
