San Francisco-based startup Import.io, which enables businesses to convert Websites into usable data, revealed Jan. 14 that it has completed a $13 million Series A round of funding.
The new investment was led by Imperial Innovations, with participation from Wellington Partners, Oxford Capital, Open Ocean, Delin Capital and AME Cloud Ventures. Import.io previously raised $4.5 million in seed and angel funding, bringing the total raised to date to $17.5 million.
Gary Read, formerly president and CEO at Boundary and Nimsoft, will join the board of directors as chairman; also joining the board are Martyn Holman of Oxford Capital, Mario Branciforti of Imperial Innovations and Jonathan Hay of Delin Capital.
As businesses come to rely more on external intelligence for critical decision-making, Web data is becoming increasingly valuable, but this data has not always been easy, fast or cost-effective to acquire or use. Previously, obtaining this type of data required businesses to manually create so-called “Web scrapers” or subscribe to expensive, generic databases that were often incomplete or incorrect.
Import.io’s Data Feeds make it possible for businesses to harness the insights from external Web data without any of the overhead of building and maintaining sources in-house.
The new funding comes after a year of record growth. In 2015, users of Import.io created more than 1million Web APIs and extracted data from more than 5.5 billion Web pages. The company said it will use the funds to further develop its data extraction technology and expand its ecosystem of analytics and visualization partners.
“The Web contains a wealth of business data and intelligence that can be used to inform decision-making—and gain competitive advantage—but most of that data is locked in an unusable format,” said David White, founder and CEO of Import.io. “Web sites are designed for human consumption—like reading pages or watching videos, not for computer-driven data analysis. Our vision is to create technology that makes it easy for businesses to translate the web into data that they can actually use.
“This new round of funding represents the biggest investment ever in web data extraction and we are thrilled to partner with investors who think just as boldly and creatively as we do about delivering on our vision.”
Import.io enables businesses to:
—Reduce the cost and complexity of getting usable Web data: Data science teams will never have to write a line of code to get Web data again. Instead, they can focus on data analysis and delivering valuable intelligence. Import.io delivers data as a direct stream via its Data API and in preferred formats that include JSON.
—Scale data-driven processes: Import.io makes it possible for businesses to extract valuable data from thousands of Websites and automatically feed it into business software for immediate use.
—Ensure that data is always accurate and up-to-date: All data feeds undergo a thorough quality assessment process to ensure that they have been properly processed. Import.io’s intelligent scheduling system updates data feeds at desired intervals: hourly, daily, weekly or monthly so that businesses are always working from the most up-to-date information.
Import.io is creating an ecosystem of data partners that represent a diverse range of services and solutions. Together they enable businesses to achieve better insight from their data. Leading technology companies that include Tableau, Interworks, Silk and Blockspring are currently using Import.io’s Data API, allowing their customers to easily extract valuable content from Websites.