Futurelytics gets $800K to advise you on what to do with customer data

While many companies know collecting data about their customers and operations is the right thing to do, they don’t always know what to do with it. A Czech startup called Futurelytics has built a system for suggesting what to do with data from Salesforce.com and other popular business software, and investors have just put some money behind the strategy.

Index Ventures and Credo Ventures are leading Futurelytics‘ seed round, which also includes contributions from Kima Ventures and Rob Keve, the former chief executive of FizzBack, the company announced today. The money will help Futurelytics build its presence in the US and the UK and help the company form partnerships.

Futurelytics already draws on many data sources to provide its service, which the company calls prescriptive analytics. It gulps data from customer-relationship management sources as well as email services like Constant Contact and MailChimp and e-commerce tools like Bigcommerce and Shopify.

Futurelytics doesn’t just serve up insights in a dashboard. They become the jumping-off point for more narrowly tailored marketing campaigns. That way, a message has the best chance of resonating with a certain subset of customers.

Surely there are other sets of data a company can ingest in order to make wiser contact with customers. Perhaps, for example, data on a website’s performance could be valuable because sluggishness could cause many users to hop off the site before completing transactions. Then marketers could reach out with a generous offer to welcome them back. So adding data sources could be a good way to make Futurelytics into a stronger tool.

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But for now it does seem like Futurelytics could be useful for companies with limited resources. A bootstrapped startup’s one business development and marketing person with no data scientist to work with might not have the time or know-how to pore over minutiae on potential and existing customers. He or she might love some help from a system that analyzes that data and makes recommendations automatically.

With its new funding, Futurelytics stands to become more widely used. Then again, the company’s approach could push marketing-automation providers like Marketo and Eloqua to help customers take in even more external data and ultimately get more out of it.