Over the next few weeks we’ll be showcasing the winners of our Elevator Pitch LIVE 2016 competition.
This week, we’re shining the light on our AdTech/MarTech Startup of the Year: GrowthIntel.
Over 200 companies applied for the competition, a number that was then whittled down to 25 finalists across the following categories: Cybersecurity, FinTech, HealthTech, PropTech and AdTech/MarTech.
On a live pitching day, a panel of five judges cast their votes to decide on one winner in each category.
Watch the short video to find our more about GrowthIntel, where the idea come from, what traction it has gained to date and what it has planned for the future.
Interviewee: Tom Gatten, CEO at GrowthIntel.
Q: Tom, thanks for joining us today. Can you tell us a bit about GrowthIntel?
GrowthIntel predicts which businesses are going to buy from you. We work on behalf of companies that are selling to small businesses and there are millions of small businesses in the country and hundreds of millions around the world.
So GrowthIntel gives you a statistical probability of each company meeting with you and it helps marketers become a lot more efficient at going outbound to talk to small businesses about their products and services, and it also allows them to address parts of the economy that they wouldn’t otherwise have tried to sell to, because we can say “look, here are lots and lots of companies that are very very likely to buy from you” and then they can go and market to that part of the economy.
Q: Where did the idea come from?
Well I’ve been helping businesses identify their best prospects for quite a number of years. I used to run a magazine called Startup Intelligence, and one day IBM came to us and said “can you find me 25 companies that are like these ones, our best prospects?”, and so we knew that they couldn’t find those companies using traditional data sources (Experian, Dun & Bradstreet, credit reference agencies) because they were too small and they were doing something that didn’t fit into a standard industry classification code. But I could go on the internet and I could find these companies, and I knew they were going to be a good prospect for IBM.
So we started writing these reports for them and I met a guy called Prash, who’s my co-founder, and he was building passive sonar systems to identify submarines from the sound of the water for the Ministry of Defence. We had the idea that maybe we could use a similar sort of technology to identify which companies were the very best prospects for IBM, and it built from there. We turned it into a software company and that’s what we do today.
Q: What would you say have been the main success points for your company so far?
Our biggest success is that our clients are making a lot of money out of GrowthIntel. We have a large logistics company that’s making £1m a month in areas of the market that they would never have gone into previously, so this is incremental revenue, and it’s a pretty big strategic deal for them.
A large business credit card company has become five times more efficient with their marketing over the last two years in using GrowthIntel. They now make five times the amount of money for every pound spent on marketing than they did previously.
Q: What do you hope to achieve for the rest of this year then?
Well we’ve got some really big clients on board now. We’ve got American Express, FedEx, Vitality Health Insurance and we’ve got a lot of companies that are in the process of working with us, so we’ve built models for them and they’re currently calling on our data.
So it’s a really exciting year because more and more of those are going to be coming through our process and starting to learn what artificial intelligence can really do for their marketing process.
View our video interviews with the other winners of Elevator Pitch LIVE 2016 here.