Startup Funding Club (SFC) has participated in a £2M funding round for AI-powered sales acceleration startup Cognism. SFC – through its Seed Fund and Angel Network – participated in the company’s first funding round back in 2016, after their presentation at the SFC Pitching & Networking event at Home House in September of the same year.
The London-based company, founded by entrepreneur James Isilay and Stjepan Buljat, helps companies accelerate sales and recruitment leads using Big Data and AI. Since its founding in 2016, Cognism has grown to over 80 paying customers in Europe and America and extended its technology to become native in Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics, becoming a leading name in European Sales Intelligence.
The £2M round was lead by South Central Ventures and supported by Startup Funding Club, the London Co-Investment Fund – which is backed by Mayor Sadiq Khan –, and Newable Private Investing.
"This funding is a testament to the team's hard work and passion,” said Cognism CEO James Isilay. “This latest round is central to our strategy of providing the best technology in sales intelligence to improve prospecting performance and to meet a new quality standard in GDPR compliant contact data.”
“We are very pleased to see one of our top performing portfolio companies achieving such an important milestone." Commented Joseph Zipfel, SFC's Investment Manager. "From the very beginning, it was clear that James and the team that he was assembling were of a very high calibre and we are pleased to back them again and take part in the next phase of growth of the company.”