Nimble<\/a> CEO Jon Ferrara has been around the contacts block a few times. He was the guy who founded Goldmine, the grandaddy of contact databases. For the last several years he has been working at Nimble, a startup with the goal of managing contacts info inside Office 365 and G Suite. Today, his company announced a $9 million Series A round.<\/p>\nThe round was led by Imagen Capital Partners with participation from Mark Cuban\u2019s Radical Investments, Google Ventures, Indicator Ventures and individual angel investors including Jason Calacanis, Howard Lindzon and Don Dodge. Today\u2019s investment brings the total raised to $12.5 million.<\/p>\n
Nimble is attempting to automate what has essentially been a manual task of collecting contact information, whether that\u2019s putting it in a rolodex back in the day or typing it into your CRM like Salesforce. Ferrara says the issue has always been the manual nature of the activity, and his company wants to make that a simple process. By storing the contacts in the cloud, you can retrieve them any place, any time, on any device (assuming you have internet access).<\/p>\n
It began by working with Google and Microsoft and their cloud app suites because he sees that as an easy way to find information where people are working, whether that\u2019s an email or other document. The company plans to offer a generic browser plug-in soon that will allow users to capture this information wherever they happen to be in the work process.<\/p>\n
Nimble window built into Office 365. Photo: Nimble<\/p>\n
Last\u00a0month, Nimble released a version that works inside of Outlook for iOS. While you could argue\u00a0that Outlook already has a contact database of sorts, Nimble gives you much richer and detailed information than most people could compile on their own without a lot of effort.<\/p>\n
The product begins by extracting any information it can find about the person. It may pull the name and email address, it then checks for online social media activity and checks the name and email against a number of private databases (which Ferrara didn\u2019t name). Using all of this information, the company builds a profile with a bunch of data about the individual \u2014 and it does this all automatically. Users can augment\u00a0this information by adding tasks, notes, deals, events and so forth. What\u2019s more it can track all of the\u00a0interactions you make inside of Nimble with a contact, so you have a history all in one place.<\/p>\n
While none of this is revolutionary, the fact it tracks\u00a0a range of information in an automated fashion could prove very useful for salespeople (or any knowledge worker who needs to keep track of a large list of individuals in a database in this fashion.)<\/p>\n
The company launched in 2009 with the pay version of the current tool launching in 2013. Nimble has 25 employees, but it\u2019s good bet it will be adding to that number with the new investment in pocket.<\/p>\n
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Featured Image: Hans Neleman<\/a>\/Getty Images<\/small><\/p>\nArticle source: http:\/\/feedproxy.google.com\/~r\/techcrunchIt\/~3\/fi3qrusHBUg\/<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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