Owler

Last updated
Owler, Inc.
FormerlyInfoArmy, Inc. [1]
Company type Subsidiary
Industry Internet services
Founded2011;13 years ago (2011)
Founder
  • Jim Fowler
  • Rajan Madhavan
  • Tim Harsch
Key people
  • Tim Harsch (CEO)
  • Jim Fowler (Chairman)
Revenue US$3.3 million
Number of employees
88
Parent Meltwater
Website owler.com

Owler is an American Internet company headquartered in San Mateo, California. It crowdsources competitive insights [2] by providing news alerts, company profiles, and polls and allows members to follow, track, and research companies in real time. The company was founded in 2011 and has over 3.5 million active users.

Contents

In June 2021, Owler agreed to be acquired by Meltwater.

History

InfoArmy was founded in 2011 by Jim Fowler, Rajan Madhavan, and Tim Harsch. Fowler previously founded Jigsaw (later called Data.com), another crowdsourcing Data as a Service platform that was sold for 175M to Salesforce in 2010. [3]

InfoArmy launched publicly in June 2012, [4] and had 28 employees as of October 23, 2012.

InfoArmy began as a crowdsourcing model where two-person research teams would compile one report on each company. Most researchers were stay-at-home parents, freelance workers, and international BPO workers. [5] Access to InfoArmy's reports cost $99 for a year-long subscription and three quarterly reports.

In January 2013, InfoArmy announced that its business model would not be sustainable in the long term.

On February 1, 2013, InfoArmy relaunched as Owler, Inc. using a different business model. [6] Owler offers a free mobile and online platform for company information and interactive business news. [7] Members can choose to "follow" a set of companies, and Owler provides a personalized newsfeed and daily email summary of the latest news on those companies. Owler members can also sign up to receive immediate notifications when major business events (such as funding, acquisitions, or leadership changes) occur. The competitive intelligence featured on Owler comes from two primary places: it is both hand-curated by Owler employees from sources across the web, and crowdsourced from Owler users. Unlike other business information services, Owler polls its members to gauge market sentiment and current trends.

On June 18, 2021, Owler entered into an agreement to be acquired by software as a service company, Meltwater, for $18.9 million in cash and $5.6 million in Meltwater equity. [8]

Funding

Owler is backed by Norwest Venture Partners and Trinity Ventures, two venture capital firms based in Silicon Valley, California. On Oct. 23, 2012, the company raised $17.3 million in Series B venture capital, bringing its funding to $19.3 million. [9] Owler has raised a total of $30.8 millionin funding over four rounds.

As part of the COVID-19 pandemic, the company received between $350,000 and $1 million in federally backed small business loan from Silicon Valley Bank as part of the Paycheck Protection Program. The company stated it would allow them to retain zero jobs. [10]

Products and technology

Owler offers a number of different services, including two email products as well as a browser-based web platform.

Web platform

Members can view their personalized newsfeed on the browser-based platform, which can be accessed via computer or smartphone. They can also view company profiles, edit profile information, and take polls through the web platform.

The web version also gives members access to lists that contain data about major events, such as funding rounds or acquisitions.

Daily Snapshot

Owler's Daily Snapshot provides users with the latest news events in their industry. Owler curates the most relevant news and blog posts from within the last 24 hours, surfacing stories on that member's company, competitors, and prospects. Each Daily Snapshot is personalized to a user's Competitive Graph and based on the companies that user follows.

Instant Insights

Owler emails users an Instant Insight anytime one of fifteen trigger events occur, including funding, acquisition, or leadership change. Users follow competitors, customers, prospects, and vendors, and Owler instantly sends full report hot anytime breaking events occur. This email features: company description, competitive landscape, and what people are saying.

Competitive Graph

Owler's Competitive Graph maps the relationship between companies. It was created by Owler's 3.5+ million members who regularly update their competitors (as well as provide estimates on critical data fields like revenue/employee numbers, CEO ratings, etc.). [11] The Competitive Graph maps how closely companies compete with one another, allowing Owler to rank competitors. The Competitive Graph powers all of Owler's products, allowing the company to provide highly personalized email alerts and feeds. [12]

Leadership

Leadership team

Board of directors

Related Research Articles

Ning is an online social media network platform for people and organizations to create custom social networks. Ning was co-founded by Marc Andreessen and Gina Bianchini and launched in October 2005. By June 2011 there were over 90,000 social websites running on the Ning Platform.

RapLeaf was a US-based marketing data and software company that was acquired by email data provider TowerData in 2013.

InsideView is a software as a service (SaaS) company that gathers insights and relationships to provide analytics on marketing to customers. Founded in 2005, InsideView is mainly used by marketing, sales, and operations teams in identifying and gathering information on customers and prospects. In April 2021, the company was acquired by Demandbase, Inc.

Norwest Venture Partners (Norwest) is an American venture and growth equity investment firm. The firm targets early to late-stage venture and growth equity investments across several sectors, including cloud computing and information technology, Internet, SaaS, business and financial services, and healthcare. Headquartered in Menlo Park, California, Norwest has offices in San Francisco and subsidiaries in Mumbai, India and Tel Aviv, Israel. The firm has funded more than 700 companies since inception.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sysomos</span> Social media analytics company

Sysomos Inc. is a Toronto-based social media analytics company owned by Outside Insight market leaders Meltwater. The company developed text analytics and machine learning technologies for user generated content, and served 80% of the top agencies and Fortune 500.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hootsuite</span> Social media management platform

Hootsuite is a social media management platform, created by Ryan Holmes in 2008. The system's user interface takes the form of a dashboard, and supports social network integrations for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube and TikTok.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Path (social network)</span> Social network

Path was a social networking-enabled photo sharing and messaging service for mobile devices that was launched on 14 November 2010. The service allowed users to share up to a total of 50 contacts with their close friends and family. Based in San Francisco, California, the company was founded by Shawn Fanning and former Facebook executive Dave Morin.

Twilio Inc. is an American cloud communications company based in San Francisco, California, which provides programmable communication tools for making and receiving phone calls, sending and receiving text messages, and performing other communication functions using its web service APIs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Udemy</span> American online learning platform

Udemy, Inc. is an education technology company, founded in May 2010 by Eren Bali, Gagan Biyani, and Oktay Caglar. It is based in San Francisco, California, United States, with hubs in Denver, Colorado; Dublin, Ireland; Austin, Texas; Melbourne, Australia; İstanbul, Turkey, and Gurgaon, India.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Act-On</span> American software company

Act-On Software is a software-as-a-service product for marketing automation. The company is headquartered in Portland, Oregon and was founded in 2008, originally retailing its software exclusively through Cisco, which provided $2 million in funding.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SendGrid</span> Email delivery service

SendGrid is a Denver, Colorado-based customer communication platform for transactional and marketing email. The company was founded by Isaac Saldana, Jose Lopez, and Tim Jenkins in 2009, and incubated through the Techstars accelerator program. As of 2017, SendGrid has raised over $81 million and has offices in Denver, Colorado; Boulder, Colorado; Irvine, California; Redwood City, California; and London.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Optimizely</span> American software company

Optimizely is an American company that provides digital experience platform software as a service. Optimizely provides A/B testing and multivariate testing tools, website personalization, and feature toggle capabilities, as well as web content management and digital commerce.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Brainly</span> Educational technology company

Brainly is an education company based in Kraków, Poland, with headquarters in New York City. It is an AI-powered homework help platform targeting students and parents. As of November 2020, Brainly reported having 15 million daily active users, making it the world's most popular education app. In 2024, FlexOS reported Brainly as the #1 Generative AI Tool in the education category and the #6 Generative AI Tool overall. Also in 2024, Andreessen Horowitz reported Brainly as #6 in the Top 50 Gen AI Mobile Apps by monthly active users.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Trove (app)</span>

Trove was a social news aggregation web and mobile application, with apps available on iOS, Android, and Fire Phone. Trove is also the name of the company behind the application, which was owned by Graham Holdings.

Declara is a social learning and collaboration technology company based in Palo Alto, California.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Webflow</span> American software company

Webflow, Inc. is an American company, based in San Francisco, that provides software as a service for website building and hosting. Their online visual editor platform allows users to design, build, and launch websites similar to Metaconex or Wix. According to W3Techs, Webflow is used by 0.6% of the top 10 million websites.

The commercialization of the Internet encompasses the creation and management of online services principally for financial gain. It typically involves the increasing monetization of network services and consumer products mediated through the varied use of Internet technologies. Common forms of Internet commercialization include e-commerce, electronic money, and advanced marketing techniques including personalized and targeted advertising. The effects of the commercialization of the Internet are controversial, with benefits that simplify daily life and repercussions that challenge personal freedoms, including surveillance capitalism and data tracking. This began with the National Science Foundation funding supercomputing center and then universities being able to develop supercomputer sites for research and academic purposes.

Foursquare Labs Inc., commonly known as Foursquare, is a geolocation technology company and data cloud platform based in the United States. Founded by Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai in 2009, the company rose to prominence with the launch of its local search-and-discovery mobile app. The app, Foursquare City Guide, popularized the concept of real-time location sharing and checking-in.

MoEngage is a customer engagement platform, headquartered in San Francisco, California, United States, with offices in Bengaluru, Jakarta, London, and Berlin, founded in 2014.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Arjun Sethi (entrepreneur)</span> American entrepreneur, investor and executive

Arjun Sethi is an American internet entrepreneur, investor and executive. He is co-founder and partner at venture capital firm Tribe Capital. Previously, he was a partner at Social Capital and an executive at Yahoo!, where he launched Yahoo! Livetext. Prior, he was co-founder and CEO of MessageMe and was the CEO of Lolapps, the developer behind Ravenwood Fair. In December 2023, he became Tribe Capital's chairman and CIO.

References

  1. ↑ "Owler, Inc.: Private Company Information - Businessweek". Businessweek.com. Archived from the original on January 18, 2015.
  2. ↑ Don Clark. "Research Startup Raises Money To Fund Its 'Army'". WSJ.
  3. ↑ "Jigsaw founder Jim Fowler launches InfoArmy". www.bizjournals.com. Retrieved 2017-01-05.
  4. ↑ Ha, Anthony (12 June 2012). "InfoArmy: Jigsaw Founder's New Startup Tackles Competitive Intelligence". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2017-01-05.
  5. ↑ Lunden, Ingrid (23 October 2012). "Data 2.0 Goes Large: InfoArmy Raises $17.3M To Build Out Its Crowdsourced Competitive Intelligence Platform". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2017-01-05.
  6. ↑ "Introducing Owler — a New Mobile Business App and Service That Promises to Be the Best Single Source for Up-to-the-Minute News, Information and Insight About Companies | Business Wire". www.businesswire.com. 25 June 2014. Retrieved 2017-01-05.
  7. ↑ "Owler.com: A New Crowdsourced Company Profiles Venture". BIIA.com | Business Information Industry Association. Retrieved 2017-01-05.
  8. ↑ Staff Writer (2021-06-18). "Meltwater acquires business information company Owler for $24.5 million in a combination of cash and equity". Intrado. GlobeNewswire, Inc. Retrieved 2021-06-18.
  9. ↑ Lunden, Ingrid (February 2013). "InfoArmy Retreats After Crowdsourced Research Business Goes Through The Floor. All Reports Now Free". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2017-01-05.
  10. ↑ Syed, Moiz; Willis, Derek (7 July 2020). "OWLER, INC. - Coronavirus Bailouts - ProPublica". ProPublica. Retrieved 7 July 2020.
  11. ↑ "Owler Introduces the Competitive Graph - A Tool for Tracking Your Competitors". StreetInsider.com. Retrieved 2017-01-05.
  12. ↑ "How the Competitive Graph Works • Owler Blog". Owler Blog. 2016-05-19. Retrieved 2017-01-05.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.