OMERS participates in funding round for Canadian competitive intelligence company
The Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System’s venture capital arm, OMERS Ventures, is participating in a series-A funding round for Klue, a Vancouver-based competitive enablement company, which it also backed at the seed stage.
Klue helps companies better understand their competition by collecting and curating competitive intelligence, combining information available on the Internet with knowledge from the company’s employees.
“The company has created a way to use the latest machine learning to track and curate information that will immediately give a company’s sales teams, customer service reps, account managers or product marketers the upper hand,” said Eugene Lee, an investor at OMERS Ventures, in an online statement.
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OMERS Ventures was joined in the $15-million, series-A funding round by other investors including funding round leader Craft Ventures, Rhino Ventures, BDC Venture Capital and several angel investors.
“For years now businesses have had a problem: how do they tap into useful data from across the company and the market to the benefit of their business?,” said Lee. “For a while, it was called big data. Then it was business intelligence. Whatever label you choose to give it, the challenge has remained: what good is intelligence if it is siloed, inconsistent and out of date? Tackling the issue of how to gather and apply data in a way that meaningfully impacts your business’s bottom line is exactly where Klue comes in.”
The latest investment will help the company accelerate product and machine learning development.
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