Introduction
Hi there, I’m Victoria from Grata. We’re a proprietary search engine used to discover privately held companies in the lower middle market and SMB space. I joined our team this past June, and over the last five months I’ve had the honor of working alongside our business development and marketing teams to help drive our sales efforts. With an incredibly talented team of 14 full time employees and growing, our key functions also include operations, customer success, as well as product and engineering.
Grata was built to help automate the research process in the SMB and middle-market segments. Companies in this space are often overlooked because they’re hard to capture. Databases don’t have good information, so you turn to articles, industry organizations, and even Google, where there’s bias in your results towards the most popular companies. Grata solves this common challenge, enabling business development professionals across all industries, to access the SMB and middle-market opportunity in an easy, and scalable way.
Market problem & data showing market problem
It’s staggering that 99% of US businesses are overlooked when prospecting. The most common reasons being that only 125k have raised VC funding, only 25k are private equity backed, and a mere 15k are public. That said, this space represents a huge opportunity, which accounts for 45% of all economic activity. It should be no surprise that companies unlocking the middle market at scale are thriving.
Grata is powered by search technology. Our machine learning algorithms read and interpret company websites enabling you to: – Deconstruct highly varied websites, classifying each section and contextualizing the content – Generate nuanced “company fingerprints” to drive powerful look-alike search and recommendations – and leverage topical semantic search and natural language interpretation, which combined help automate your daily prospecting workflow.
Describe the history of your tech
Our co-founders, Andrew and and Nevin, met while studying at Harvard. After graduation Andrew went on to start a software engineering company, while Nevin spent time in management consulting and private equity. However, both were confronted with the same challenges, and dreamed of finding a way to break traditional database filters to automate private company research. Andrew and Nevin started Grata as a bootstrapped company in early 2016, and have since grown to support over 100 customers across a variety of different industries. We’re also excited to share that we recently raised our first round of seed funding, led by Bling Capital. Still operating as a private company, but now supported by a team of seasoned investors and advisors, including our earliest supporters Todd Benon and Kerry Hatch.
Who do you best serve (your customers)?
Our clients typically fall within one of three buckets: sales and marketing, financial services, and recruiting. Across all three segments, we specialize in supporting business development teams to more acurately identify prospects in the private company space. Our sales, marketing, and recruiting users leverage Grata to build targeted lead lists to identify prospects, while our financial services clients use Grata to source deals and map untapped markets.
How do you solve the market problem?
Grata simplifies and automates the business development process. Our verticalized web search allows our users to quickly identify companies they wouldn’t have been able to uncover with a Google search, or in a legacy database. Our search technology makes SMB and lower middle market prospecting at scale possible.
Grata’s search technology makes prospecting into the lower middle market space incredibly easy, automating what used to take hours, if not days, of manual research. We offer breadth (coverage of over 4M private companies and counting), depth (deeper, more nuanced information), and quality (we’re continuously refreshing our data) at a lower cost compared to the legacy data providers.
Demo of your tech
The most common way to get started using Grata is to create a proprietary search based on the essence of what a company actually does. If I wanted to identify all of the HVAC service companies that focus on residential contracts, I would construct my query using the Web Search box, and then layer on additional filters like location, size, ownership, and funding to further refine my search results based on my ideal customer profile. As you’ll see here, Grata is surfacing all of the companies that identify as a HVAC service company, and also mention somewhere on their website that they focus on residential contracts.
After creating your target account list, you have the ability to discovery companies tat look similar to those already in your list identify contacts by title, and create alerts to notify you of any meaningful changes (such as hiring, growth, ownership, and funding).
Examples of customers helped
One Medical, one of our earliest clients, leverages Grata to quickly identify privately held companies in the middle market space.
What was the before and after (the impact)?
Before Grata, they had spent countless hours manually researching prvate companies sifting through legacy databases and individual websites. With Grata, that time is now spent helping expand their reach to deliver care in today’s fast moving market.
Any quirks or limitations of your tech?
Search can be powerful but can sometimes lead you astray. To get the most out of search, you need to know what you’re looking for. We’re building NLP technology to make this process easier, with suggestion, helpers, and tips, but the users who get the most out of Grata are the ones who are the best searchers.
Where does your tech sit in the MarTech stack?
Grata powers the database part of your MarTech stack, helping you find the companies you need for your targeted campaigns. Start with Grata to identify your ideal customer, run a contact search to obtain verified emails, and easily integrate with your CRM to start your outreach process!
Pricing, onboarding, timeline of adoption.
With an engineering first and customer service led culture, our user experience is the team’s number one priority. Every client recieves access to a dedicated account manager to help drive success, and we also have a managed services offering that includes analyst support for custom projects. Grata is intuitive – we say that if you can use Google, you’ll be up to speed on Grata.