Big Data firm Colabo raises $1.5M in seed funding from The Hive, angels

California-based Colabo, a provider of sales acceleration solutions, has raised a seed round of $1.5 million (Rs 8.9 crore) led by Big Data focused incubator The Hive. A group of private investors, including Paul Maritz, Raghu Raghuram and Ray Rothrock, also participated in the round.

The fund will be used to support the growth of Colabo's lead discovery and qualification platform, as well as for scaling up the company's operations.

"We feel the CRM space is ripe for disruption by a next generation of data integration and predictive analytics solutions like Colabo," said TM Ravi, founder, The Hive.

Set up in late 2010 by serial entrepreneurs Yoav Dembak, Asaf Wexler and Naama Halperin, Colabo is a multi-functional software that enables professionals across industries to achieve business objectives, including lead qualification, lead generation and trend prediction. Prior to Colabo, the co-founders had started B-hive, which was acquired by VMware in 2008.

Colabo gathers data from any source that can be browsed online and displays them on an easy-to-use dashboard. It also analyses the data and alerts users when significant changes occur in the sources that are being tracked. Additionally, it visualises the sources on a series of graphs that help users better understand the data at hand. The company claims that using its products, customers have seen a 3x increase in monthly sales and a 50 per cent cut in sales cycles.

The Hive, the Big Data startup fund launched by Patni siblings—Amit and Arihant Patni and Ravi—mainly look at backing firms that leverage global markets. It helps entrepreneurs go from concept to company and invests up to $2 million per company at the seed stage and works actively with portfolio companies till they receive Series A financing.

"The fund is targeting ventures operating in multi-channel marketing, CRM, security, IT management, e-commerce, retail, media, advertising, financial services and insurance, telecommunication and healthcare," Arihant Patni had told Techcircle.in earlier adding that the fund will invest in three-five companies per year.

Colabo is the second firm backed by The Hive. Last year, Bangalore-based Big Data firm Flutura Solutions had raised an undisclosed amount from the fund.

(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)