Sentieo Raises $6M Seed Funding for Expansion

The investment round was led by Santa Monica, Calif.-based fintech venture capital firm Clocktower Technology Ventures and investment firm Long Focus Capital, with angel investments from StockTwits founder Howard Lindzon, former Thomson Financial CEO David Flaschen, Adobe chief product officer Scott Belsky, as well as Aniq Rahman, president of consumer analytics provider Moat, and other executives at investment management firms.

Sentieo co-founder and CEO Alap Shah says the vendor will use the investment to build out more datasets and more intelligence around its core search engine, and make its full suite of functionality—including its Notebook feature and Research Management System—accessible to clients.

In addition, the vendor will increase its sales presence in the US and abroad, after growing client numbers from 150 to more than 450 over the past year. “We’ve always invested in the product, and now we are investing more actively in marketing and hiring enterprise sales reps. And now we also have to decide when to make sales hires in Europe and Asia. We are getting demand from those regions, so we want to establish sales presences there,” Shah says, adding that this will likely happen sometime in the second or third quarter.

The seed funding will also help the company prepare for a planned Series A funding round within the next six to 12 months. Shah says that he and his brother—co-founder and president Naman Shah—had initially funded the business, and could have continued to do so, but wanted to raise initial funding so that potential Series A investors would see the business “in a more established place,” and to enlist outside expertise to contribute to the company’s growth. Though none of the new investors will join Sentieo’s board, Shah says they will be actively involved in helping to set the company’s roadmap and “opening doors” to new opportunities.

For example, Shah says, Clocktower has experience raising Series A funding; Long Focus is a “heavy” user of Sentieo’s platform, and has been instrumental in prioritizing development of new features; Flaschen has been instrumental in building and scaling sales organizations; and Lindzon has experience of understanding how consumers respond to a platform.

“We’ve been quite picky in terms of finding folks who could bring us a value-add. We actually had more interest, and most of the folks who are interested are clients—they see the potential of the platform… and not just the upside of an equity investment, but also [the benefit of] being able to contribute to shaping the platform,” Shah says.