To start off, this startup Owler is in the business of, well, business intelligence It’s main mission is to help professionals & businesses know how they stack up against their competitors, & to provide “crisp” intelligence & alerts on their competitors, customers, partners, etc.
Owler’s Competitive Graph helps business professionals monitor & analyze their competitors. In its own words, the company says that the Graph maps the relationships between companies, similar to how Facebook’s Social Graph maps the relationships between people.
Owler, which has over 15 mln company profiles, has been created by its more than 100,000 members who regularly update their competitors (as well as provide estimates on critical data fields like revenue/employee numbers, CEO ratings, etc.)
When you sign up for Owler, there is a short, on-boarding process, by which new members understand what Owler is & how do things work there. The 1st thing you are asked is to identify your company & to name your top 3 competitors. By way of business intelligence, this new startup has lots to offer. After sign-up, you will start to receive a free quarterly Competitive Intelligence Reports (CIRs). Further, the ‘Owler Daily Snapshot’ will send you news & alerts on as many companies as you like, including your company as well as the competition. Members also receive 3 different types of special reports.
In a press release issued by the company, Owler CEO Jim Fowler explains, “Imagine sitting down with all the employees in your office & asking them to list your company’s top 5 competitors. When you combine all the lists the result is a comprehensive wisdom-of-crowds ranking of your competitors. When you expand the exercise to include hundreds of thousands of participants you get a powerful network effect. With each new contributor the value of the data increases exponentially.”
To reiterate Owler members are able to leverage the Competitive Graph in a variety of ways, & it’s all free to use. This includes competitive intelligence reports (analysis), daily snapshots (news & alerts), & special reports (fundings, acquisitions, etc.)
Fowler has also highlighted the fact that there are 1000s of potential ways to use the Competitive Graph, such as plugging a list of existing customers into the Competitive Graph & receiving back a list of prospects to target.
San Mateo, CA-based Owler, Inc. was founded in 2011 by Jim Fowler, Rajan Madhavan, & Tim Harsch. Jim Fowler is the company’s CEO. Rajan Madhavan is their VP of Engineering, & Tim Harsch is the company’s Director of Product. Owler has raised US $19.3 million in 2 funding rounds, including a $17.3 million Series B funding round in Oct 2012.
– This post is merely a startup profile based on publicly available information & not a review. –
Image Credit: Owler
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