Mattermark raises $6.5 million to help investors rank startups

Business intelligence company Mattermark has been described as “counting cards” when it comes to evaluating startups amid a sea of gamblers. And it looks like the strategy is paying off, as the company is announcing today that it has raised $6.5 million in a first round of institutional funding. The brainchild of entrepreneur Danielle Morrill, Mattermark compiles and analyzes various kinds of data about startups in order to evaluate, rank, and track their growth over time. The company uses social media, app store rankings, Alexa.com rankings, anonymous tips, AngelList, and news articles, among other things, to do that.

Mattermark, the business intelligence site that pivoted out of YC-backed curation site Referly, is today announcing that it has raised a round of $6.5 million, funding that the startup will use to build out its ambition to be a “B2B Google.” By that, it means creating structured data for people on the hunt for company information across the messy and disorganised Internet and its many available sources of primary and secondary data. Or, as new investor Brad Feld of the Foundry Group puts it, uncovering a “valuable secret hidden in plain sight.” As part of this Series A, Feld is joining Mattermark’s board of directors. It brings the total raised by the startup to $11.3 million. When San Francisco-based Mattermark first opened for business in 2013, the company’s first moves were aimed squarely in its backyard: it provided deal information to VCs and others in the world of startups, tapping into the concept of big data to create a signalling platform to monitor deal flow and better anticipate what will be the next big thing without investing hours in the process of doing so. “We don’t believe we can replace investors’ ability to build relationships with entrepreneurs, but we do think we can help them source opportunities more efficiently and reduce the chances of missing a whale,” co-founder Danielle Morrill said at the time.