Though Mattersight has been only been offering fresh analytics solutions to enterprises since 2006, its team has been around the Chicago tech scene since the dot-com boom and is already on their second go-round as a Chicago startup story. Mattersight has a “unique” history of being incubated within a public consulting company, eLoyalty, but that hasn’t yet stopped the company from innovating just like a young startup: in fact, this month Mattersight closed a $6 million additional share issuance to continue doing just that.
“We are a startup, but we do have this unique twist in that we are public,” David Gustafson, executive vice president of products and marketing, said.
The 230-person Mattersight team fully rebranded and transformed over two years ago into its current position as a leading enterprise analytics company when eLoyalty, which IPO’d in 2000, was sold off.
“We really have gone through that Chicago startup phase twice,” Gustafson said. “As a consulting company that was a big Chicago IPO right in the middle of the dot-com boom, at the height of the bubble; we did have a good story and a good IPO at that point. Now, we really have reinvented ourselves as a business and analytics company.”
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Though Mattersight has a data center in Minnesota and a development team in Austin, Texas, the company has stayed true to its Chicago roots. All of Mattersight’s executive and global support teams are in Chicago, a talent base which Gustafson said has largely been acquired thanks to Chicago’s high-quality universities.
The recent $6 million funding will be used to expand Mattersight’s local 140-person team, Gustafson said, so that the company can propel the growth of its popular Predictive Behavioral Routing solution. The technology is in high demand because it uses 8 million algorithms to “decode every second of the human language” and turn it into structured data, so that when a customer calls into a company they will be matched with the best possible service representative to fit them.
“Personality style, engagement, empathy, distress… we create all these data attributes and work with these companies to turn that data into business value for them,” Gustafson said.
This $6 million funding was a key step to continue providing Predictive Behavioral Routing because, as a SaaS solution, Mattersight bears the upfront expense before companies begin paying the monthly fee.
“We didn’t want to charge anything upfront because we didn’t want any barriers to getting new customers,” Gustafson said. “We are confident it works, we know we are going to drive value and we know that if they try it they will stay with us and continue to pay us for it.”
So far, Gustafson’s theory has proven true: in Q2, Mattersight had five companies on board piloting the Predictive Behavioral Routing solution and by Q3 had brought 17 more on. Gustafson said he is hoping to repeat these promising numbers in Q4 and well into 2014: “What we are hoping to do in the next year is have a significant increase in the number of accounts and companies with this new go-to market strategy and this new offer.”
As Mattersight looks to grow its list of customers (which are historically Fortune 500 companies), the company also wants to spread the word locally and globally about its new brand and new solutions, Gustafson said.
“Because we spun off, the name is new,” Gustafson said. “We have some really unique insights and intellectual properties and we want the world to know about that.”
