SalesOptimize, an Irish sales leads company that compiles lists of online vendors for merchants, has closed a €1.6m fundraiser with private investors, Elkstone Partners and Enterprise Ireland.

The business, led by co-founder Liz Fulham (pictured), combs through the web looking for online e-commerce sites, using web-crawlers to download terabytes of data. This is then analysed to understand whether the site is potentially of interest to online merchant suppliers.

SalesOptimize also looks for additional data such as social media followers, web traffic volumes and ranking metrics, and contacts for the site. It currently has detailed data on around 1.7 million e-commerce sites, while clients include DHL and Bank of Ireland.

Enterprise Ireland invested €300,000 as part of the latest fundraiser while Elkstone invested €500,000. EIIS investors, including members of the founders' extended family, invested €510,000, while two investors in Dublin and Cork invested €150,000 each.  SalesOptimize booked a loss of €300,000 in 2017, according to Liz Fulham (CEO).

“SalesOptimize has fixed the problem of sales lead generation by extracting the latest information on companies directly from the internet,” Fulham explained.

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“To date our primary focus has been on the $2 trillion global e-commerce market. The current round of investment will help us to analyse new industries, such as travel, charities, digital goods and marketplace sellers, and localise the product in over 20 countries.”

Declan Magee, head of venture at Elkstone, said that Fulham and her team have built a great product which has had strong validation with clients. “Driving sales through a fully-fledged sales team is now the priority, along with further product enhancement,” he added.