Coveo Raises $18M for Big Data-driven CRM

Pedro Hernandez

Updated · Dec 10, 2012

Coveo, a Quebec City-based enterprise search and Big Data specialist, announced today that it had raised $18 million. The funds will help it keep pace with brisk demand for its technology, the company claims.

Tandem Expansion Fund led the round, with backing from BDC Venture Capital, Propulsion Ventures SEC and Fonds de solidarité FTQ. According to Coveo, the money will be used to beef up sales and marketing and grow its operations to better handle an expected influx of new customers.

In a press statement, Coveo hints it has the history to back up that sentiment. It says it has achieved several quarters of 80 to 100 percent year-over-year growth in license revenue this year and currently operates “at or close to profitability.”

For Andre Gauthier, managing director of the Tandem Expansion Fund, the stars are aligning around Coveo’s technology and the industry’s appetite for Big Data solutions.

“Coveo has invested heavily in its technology, the market timing is a perfect storm for solutions that enable greater insight into highly fragmented data, and its customers rave about the ROI of the technology. We think Coveo is about to experience explosive growth,” Gauthier says.

Enterprise Search Gets Social for CRM

The company’s unified indexing technology lends its enterprise search platform a social edge, which can help foster customer engagement and customer relationship management (CRM) efforts. That requires wrangling — and drawing insights — from several disparate sources of data, says Coveo CEO Louis Têtu.

“Companies are struggling mightily with big, fragmented data, and are recognizing the need for powerful information access and consolidation technologies like never before. This is a major shift brought on by the need to better engage with customers, ensuring that every customer experience is more relevant and additive,” Têtu says.

Coveo’s platform can “crawl” various Big Data sources, including social networks, cloud services and on-premise databases and present users with context-aware information and insights. To date, Coveo offers solutions for Web content management, enterprise content management and the hot CRM sales and support market.

In September, the company launched Coveo for Salesforce. Available on the CRM platform’s AppExchange, the product integrates with the Salesforce user interface and serves as a recommendation engine that presents relevant information on accounts, leads or support cases. Later the same month, Coveo added Dropbox support, enabling Salesforce users to draw insights from the popular cloud file storage platform.

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.

Pedro Hernandez
Pedro Hernandez

Pedro Hernandez contributes to Enterprise Apps Today, and 11Press, the technology network. He was previously the managing editor of Internet.com, an IT-related website network. He has expertise in Smart Tech, CRM, and Mobile Tech, Helping Banks and Fintechs, Telcos and Automotive OEMs, and Healthcare and Identity Service Providers to Protect Mobile Apps.

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