September 28, 2020 | Source – San Diego Business Journal. (By Fred Grier)
LeadCrunch, a business-to-business lookalike demand generation platform that reduces the costs of customer acquisition, has seen astronomical growth over the last few years and is not looking back.
Founded in 2013, the San Diego company was co-founded by Olin Hyde, serial entrepreneur and former engineer, and Sanjit Singh co-founder and former chief operating officer.
Generating demand on a global scale, the company works with medium-sized and small-business clients, with revenue between $20 million and $2 billion. To date, more than 500 enterprises have used LeadCrunch over the past three years helping it to become one of the fastest-growing companies in the United States.
Recognizable customers include Google (NYSE: GOOGL), Workday (NYSE: WDAY), Intel Corp. (NYSE: INTC), Oracle Corporation (NYSE: ORCL), and more than two dozen midmarket companies.
“Our artificial intelligence delivers the best targeting, segmentation, and highest quality B2B leads,” said Hyde, CEO of LeadCrunch. “Our growth was fueled by a great need in enterprise marketing: better data, better targeting, and better results. Our technology achieves just that.”
$160B Lead Generation Industry
Tapping artificial intelligence, the marketing firm can help identify patterns that describe companies most likely to buy from you. Unlike lead brokers, trade shows, and other lead sources, LeadCrunch scans all data in real-time for better target sales efforts.
For example, LeadCrunch’s software has the ability to take a list of a client’s 25 best customers, review billions of pieces of information about U.S. businesses on the internet, and prepare a list of similar companies that the client’s sales department can approach.
LeadCrunch works primarily with customers that run multiple campaigns, the “Demand generation” is a $160 billion plus industry.
Businesses grow three times faster than their competitors within three years of using LeadCrunch, said Hyde. He added that LeadCrunch’s AI is 217% more accurate at targeting and classifying company data than traditional data sources.
This data advantage enables LeadCrunch to help its clients better target, segment and prioritize their target accounts.
“Our A.I. has the ability to learn the true nature of our customers’ customers,” said Hyde. “We excel in markets where there is a high customer lifetime value, a complex selling environment, and where the sale is fairly technical.”
Company Growth
In total, LeadCrunch has raised $18.5 million from top-tier venture capital firms, including San Fransico’s Bow Capital, Rally Ventures, and ExCapsa Group.
LeadCrunch got its start by incubating at UC San Diego’s StartR accelerator and EvoNexus. The company also won “Cool Company” awards from the San Diego Venture Group in 2015 and 2016.
Over the last three years, the company has grown its revenues by 7,249%. In 2019, the company’s annual revenue numbers were $11.7 million and is on pace to double growth this year. The company brought in $8.4 million in 2018.
Rory Moore CEO and co-founder at EvoNexus said he ranks LeadCrunch among the top of his list as a San Diego company that has successfully identified its product-market fit as well as attract venture capital from investors.
“Of the 260 deals that we have incubated at EvoNexus, California’s leading non-profit incubator, LeadCrunch is one of the top examples of a company that carefully matched product innovation to customer needs and then successfully raised several rounds of institutional investor funding. Great fundraising success is an indication of the quality of the deal,” said Moore.
IPO is the Goal
Looking forward, the company anticipates expanding its headcount, although Hyde noted that the most important thing as CEO is to manage cash effectively.
LeadCrunch has no plans to IPO soon but Hyde said he would like to see Jeff Lundsford, CEO at Tealium and Doug Winter, co-founder and CEO at Seismic to go public first.
“We are at the beginning of a much longer journey. Our goal is to IPO when we are a “decacorn,” this is the only controllable outcome we have. Lots of good things will happen along the journey if we commit to a big audacious goal with the discipline of daily execution.”
Headquartered in Downtown San Diego, the company employs roughly 35 staffers with sales teams in Boston, San Francisco, and Chicago.
At age 12, Hyde wrote his first line of code for his first entrepreneurial venture, selling encyclopedias door-to-door. At 25, he started his first company and, at 28, exited. Since then, Olin has launched and invested in several more companies, including National Facilities Group (acquired by Accruent) and Auto-Semantics (acquired by ai-one). He also holds a Masters of Advanced Studies in Systems Engineering from UC San Diego and a Bachelors of Philosophy from Miami University.
