In financial markets, not all innovative projects that seek investment are worth investing in, and many of them are not worth considering. How can smart investors go through this layer of fog? How can venture capital funds or angel investors find innovative ideas that meet their portfolio goals as efficiently as possible?
This is the origin of Mattermark. It provides a key tool for investors who are overwhelmed with information so that they can quickly and easily find the information they need in an ever-increasingly complex private equity market.
Origin
When Danielle Morrill was 18 years old, it was at the turn of the century. When she first came to university, she dropped out of the Olympic School in Bremerton and went to work at a shipping company near Seattle.
For some employees, the large number of shipments of container invoices and contracts is only a headache and there is nothing important, but Danielle Morrill made them Mattermark.
"What was packed in the container, who was transported, and where it was transported, I was fascinated by it at the time," said 31-year-old Danielle Morrill. "Such details like this actually contain more stories."
"I don't recommend that everyone try to drop out of school because not everyone is like me," she said with a smile, "but I have to say that dropping out of school gives me time to understand what really touches me."
Three founders: Kevin Morrill, Danielle Morrill, and Andy Sparks
Mattermark
This curiosity ultimately motivated an emerging technology company to become a large corporation. Mattermark presents the data in a very simple way by analyzing a lot of details about the private sector.
"We know that the name of a large listed company represents only 0.1% of 2,500 companies, and our goal is to help any company that wants to invest or sell products to other 99.9% companies, understand what they are doing and how to do it. .
Of course, you can search through Google, but most of the information you get is for consumers, and we are serving Google or Wikipedia for private companies. â€
Startup company's "Wikipedia"
Usatoday
In terms of core business, Mattermark focuses on media services and can be understood as a "startup company search engine." All of the search results provided by Mattermark are related to startups, allowing investors to focus on research and find news and other information related to startups without filtering noise.
Danielle Morrill said: “We originally planned to build a media company that reported on start-up companies, but soon discovered that this business was difficult to do. So we turned the data used to write reports into products. Users can subscribe and log in. Look at the startup's data, and it seems that this demand is still quite large.â€
Mattermark was born to help investors find truly worthwhile projects in thousands of startups. Mattermark is committed to helping people better understand startups by collecting data, allowing investors to focus on research with precision, and analyzing the factors that are most likely to make startups successful in the future.
When Danielle Morrill and her husband, programmer Kevin Morrill, founded Mattermark in 2013, they released a fairly simple prototype and the initial product performance was not good.
But soon, some venture capitalists saw its value - when Danielle Morrill arranged the portfolio of venture capitalist Mark Anderson from best to worst, the other party called Morrill to call " We should do this" - but few investors will think of how big a market this newly established company will have.
“I think maybe many investors are aware that they didn’t do enough due diligence and the information they dug wasn’t deep enough. The result was that they were wasting time. They could have spent 10 minutes to judge a startup. Whether the company is worth meeting and we helped solve this problem.â€
Data prepared specifically for investors and sales
MatterMark's core business mainly includes two aspects, one is data and the other is analysis tool.
In the past two years, Mattermark has maintained rapid growth, especially those companies that want to provide services to newly established high-tech companies, and have also contributed to the increase in cooperation. Cloud platform and sales platform companies also want to know which company will need this service. The 40-employee company has so far raised $ 10.90 million. Today, the company has 500 customers, each paying $6,000 a year.
"Now we are tracking and analyzing 1.2 million faster-growing internet companies," Danielle Morrill said. As far as competition is concerned, although she acknowledges that some of the original resource materials already exist -- from the Hoover database to Standard & Poor's Capital IQ -- "they mainly provide unsorted data, so you have to spend time sorting."
She is convinced - aside from outstanding business intuitions - that data will ultimately allow entrepreneurs to make important decisions, especially when they need to allocate valuable funds. Because business consulting firms and investment banks always rely on high-quality data analysis to complete their work, "so they spend about 80% of their time on collating information rather than analyzing information. We have exactly this advantage."
Mattermark software picks out key indicators from over 1 million new companies and then categorizes them into data sheets in an easy-to-digest way.
Mattermark
Mattermark not only provides search tools that are useful to investors, but also creates analytical tools for these data.
Danielle Morrill said: “We also found that these useful data for investors are also useful for sales, marketing, etc. The market is even bigger, and we can help with sales and provide marketing insights.†Mattermark also tracks startups The most important factors for company, valuation, and ultimate success are combined and these factors are combined into an algorithm that can be customized by investors.
Danielle Morrill said: “We are very concerned about the impact of actions taken by marketers. Most marketers focus on getting more visitors, allowing more users to interact with them on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin, or allowing users to Download your own company’s iPhone app. We feel that we can determine how successful the startup is in taking these actions.â€
Mattermark
For the private equity market, the role of MatterMark can not be ignored.
From 1980 to 2000, there were an average of 311 companies listed each year, of which 165 were small-cap companies; and from 2001 to 2009, this number dropped to 102/year, of which only 30 were small-cap companies. .
Not only that, but now the company's market is growing in size. In the past, companies with less than $1 billion worth of companies that were not listed have become commonplace. Aileen Lee of Cowboy Ventures invented the term "Unicorn" to describe startups valued at more than $1 billion, and they are also Mattermark's focus.
Danielle Morrill said: “In the past, the market value of the company will reach or exceed US$1 billion. This is why people are very interested in unicorns. They are not yet listed, but they are already so large. So people always ask 'Are these companies worth a billion dollars?'"
The discussion of whether this valuation is reasonable or not is very tricky. Listed companies have stock prices to measure, many analysts, fund managers and investors will compare the stock price and corporate earnings to measure its value.
The private equity market process is similar, but it is not as transparent as the open market. This is where Mattermark enters. With the reduction in the number of listed companies and the increasing number of investments in the private equity market, it is becoming more and more important to be able to search for private equity information efficiently and simply. For venture capital firms or angel investors who want to spend money on key areas, a media service that is dedicated to collecting and sharing these necessary data is essential.
Start-up companies are an important part of the U.S. economy, driving the growth and innovation of most jobs. It is these that have created true prosperity. With so many companies hiding the future of Google and Amazon, finding them can bring huge returns. The systematic study of early investments through data and analysis is the key to building a solid investment portfolio.
Obviously, it is not easy to find the most reliable investment opportunities, otherwise everyone will make a fortune. But Mattermark's tools allow users to make sensible, comprehensive decisions, leaving attention to the most noteworthy start-ups.
Mattermark's Magic: Machine Learning
In the age of the Internet, data can be described as vast, and how does Mattermark get the information it needs from these vast amounts of data? Naturally, web scraping, natural language processing, and machine learning help. And why is the algorithm so important?
In a share of Samiur Rahman, he responded like this:
Machine learning allows us to accomplish tasks that cannot be performed by humans and has the advantage of victory. Given that our competitors are still using traditional methods such as data analysis, machine learning is not only a smarter way, but it also saves a lot of manpower.
So how does Mattermark do this? It is mainly divided into four steps:
1. Divide labels by industry
Want to learn more about a company? Perhaps there have been some sporadic introductions on the Internet. Then, Mattermark will cut down the online related websites, company descriptions, and even the information on Twitter. They will analyze the algorithm and judge the nature of the company: Economics Or a game factory? Is it a software company or a transportation company?
2. Subject attribution
Users who want to have an in-depth understanding of the company will want to be able to obtain each other's complete historical news coverage. After all, news is the most open and direct way to understand. Mattermark crawls hundreds of news sources and finds the direction of the topics it covers.
3. Content extraction
Subsequently, Mattermark will extract different key information according to the needs of users. For example, when the user is very sensitive to the A round of financing, when reading TechCrunch news, the eyes will not consciously stay below the amount of red boxes, financing rounds and Investors and other information. What Mattermark is doing is helping users extract this information, and the system can automatically read 1,000 articles per day.
4. Find Similar Companies
It is difficult to find a comparable company, but if it is a million companies, there will be inextricably linked trillions of companies. At this point, the advantages of artificial intelligence have emerged. Mattermark can collect the comparison information of 300,000 companies without much manpower and material resources. The charm of machine learning is here.
In the future, Mattermark plans to use machine learning to accomplish many things, including:
1. Aggregation industry information
The industry is changing with each passing day. If some new companies cannot be categorized using the current existing labels, then the system will model them; and when such companies accumulate to a certain stage, humans will conduct verification and inspection and decide whether to establish a New label.
2. Capital forecast
Through the system's data calculation, users can get the speculation that the company will be able to raise funds in the next six months; VCs and investors naturally will not reject the news of one-handed transactions; business development managers will also want to know which and which Companies will have more chances to deal with. Mattermark has accumulated a great deal of data over the past three years and Danielle Morrill has also begun to use it for training systems.
3. Siri in the business world
With the system's intelligence, we can ask Mattermark some more specific questions, such as adding a variety of qualifiers, making Mattermark a Siri of the business community.
More data, more questions
In December 2014, Mattermark received A round 6.5 million U.S. dollars financing from FG Angels Investment, and in March this year it received a 7.3 million U.S. dollar round B financing from the Foundry Group, with a valuation of 42 million U.S. dollars. At present, the company has 50 employees, mainly for large companies, private equity funds, sales and marketing companies and other 500 customers, monthly revenue of 300,000 US dollars.
Although there are many myths born in Silicon Valley, Danielle Morrill as a beneficiary does not feel bad about it.
"I'm really tired of Silicon Valley, because when you have nothing to do, you may become very concerned about it immediately. It's just a matter of little attention," Danielle Morrill said with a smile. "I decided to write microblogging (about high-tech companies), think about it, write it, and then act as a dispenser."
Her blog posts focusing on the analysis of key indicators quickly gained attention. Soon after, Danielle Morrill received seed money from venture capital giant NEA. NEA even proposed to hire Morrill and his wife as an analyst for his company. But Danielle Morrill decided that if NEA is interested, then this may be a business opportunity.
Although some days are more difficult - "Although venture capital firms have a lot of money to invest, when investing in research, they are very embarrassed." She said - Danielle Morrill and his wife finally got public attention, and then made the whole of Silicon Valley Interested.
“The key message I want to convey to entrepreneurs is that some people will say that your idea is too small, but if you believe in your ideas, don’t give up and then find a team of people who identify with you to work together,†said Danielle Morrill. "For us, we just have to believe in one principle: the more data we provide, the more questions people will ask."
Danielle Morrill also believes that any company that wants to get complex data simply can become their customer. “Our millennials, growing up with Facebook, naturally want the software to be more humane,†she said. “The world is getting bigger and more unknowable, but it may not be.â€
At least, MatterMark is trying to change this.
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