KnowledgeHound fetches $2.7M to double its team in Chicago

by Andreas Rekdal
November 17, 2016

Market research startup KnowledgeHound announced on Wednesday that it has closed a $2.7 million Series A round of funding. The company will use the funding to double the size of its Chicago-based team over the next 12 months, ramping up its pace of innovation as well as its marketing efforts.

“We are a new-to-the-world platform and technology, so really it’s about driving awareness in the market,” said founder Kristi Zuhlke. “The second piece is continuing to develop more of our technology and become even more sophisticated in surfacing insights that these companies never knew they had.”

Market research can be expensive, and the resulting data is often underutilized. KnowledgeHound helps companies dig back into the data after a study has been completed to search for new insights that can be used to make well-informed decisions.

“Today, companies are spending millions and millions of dollars on market research, all to just be saving it on their hard drives or unsearchable shared drives, and to be capturing it in PowerPoint presentations and Word documents,” said Zuhlke. “We enable them to search it seamlessly.”

Zuhlke launched KnowledgeHound after working as a consumer insights manager at Procter & Gamble. While there, she grew frustrated with all the work her team put into replicating research for which she knew the company already had data. With KnowledgeHound, she is working to do something about it.

In addition to allowing companies to unlock new value in their existing market research, KnowledgeHound’s analytics engine also generates charts and graphs on the fly. Its customers include household brands like Procter & Gamble, Clorox, SC Johnson and Whirlpool.

Seyen Capital Senior Managing Director George Spencer led KnowledgeHound’s Series A round, in which Gaspar Group, InvestHER and BRJ Ventures also participated.

“I was really pleased that we were able to get a lead investor from Chicago,” said Zuhlke. “The common thread through all of our funding has been people who really understand the pain point that we’re solving in the marketplace.”

KnowledgeHound has previously raised a $1.2 million seed round in 2015, bringing its funding total to just under $4 million. The company currently has 11 employees.

Image via KnowledgeHound.

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