The article below is part of our SaaS Spotlight Series featuring companies from our 2020 SaaS 1000 List, click here to read more about our selection methodology and to view the full list of winners.
In 2009, Mohit Bhakuni recognized a unique opportunity. According to Bhakuni, companies need the information to make informed decisions. They need information on their competitors, key customers, specific market segments. But such business information was not being comprehensively covered by the mainstream media. Even business-focused publications cover only strategically significant events of large companies. But most business events are not strategically significant and most companies are not large. Most companies operate in a microcosm of other companies and narrow market segments. This lack of breadth and depth of coverage catalyzed the development of Contify.
Bhakuni and his team began to develop a product to address this problem. The idea was to aggregate unstructured data from deep web sources such as company websites, regulatory portals, job boards, and more, to help companies track information on their competitors, key customers, and market segment. “The key idea was to extract actionable insights from millions of articles most of which are irrelevant or have duplicate information,” Bhakuni says. “We wanted to make this information useful for the end-users.”
They soon found that information from social channels is helpful too. So, they continued to refine their algorithms to ingest updates, social posts, job postings, and more to expand the scope of their information sourcing. However, extracting intelligence from unstructured data is easier said than done. It took many years to develop the core intelligence extraction engine. These developments finally took shape as a market and competitive intelligence platform: Contify.
“The unique value of Contify is that there are other web- or social-listening platforms, which primarily focused on PR communications for online reputation management, but the market lacked platforms that were designed for professionals who need information to take business decisions. That is where Contify shines,” Bhakuni expresses. Through advanced machine learning and contextual noise-filtering algorithms, Contify’s Competitive Intelligence solution can deliver actionable intelligence to assist companies in making strategic and business decisions. “Our company’s mission statement is to help professionals make informed decisions,” Bhakuni says.
Since its inception, Contify has achieved multiple successes, including remaining a completely bootstrapped company. “Being a bootstrapped company, we have had to be innovative in more than one way. We had to think about how to not only generate innovative ideas but to generate cash flow too,” Bhakuni admits. In the first two years, Contify reached half a million dollars in ARR. But it took many years of development – build, scrap, and re-build – to bring an innovative product in a new category to the market. In the past two years, Contify has grown at 35% in 2018, 42% in 2019, and in 2020, despite the COVID-19 pandemic, Contify continues to see growth and expects to grow at least 20%.
“We want to help professionals make informed decisions so that their companies can compete fairly, add value in the ecosystem, and create job opportunities. “What makes me most proud of Contify is that we managed to develop an AI-based SaaS product in a new category while remaining bootstrapped and maintaining the core values and culture of the company,” Bhakuni says. And that is what he hopes Contify will continue to do as it grows and takes shape.
We have an acronym that defines who we are and how we do things,” Bhakuni emphasizes.
C – Customer Success
O – Ownership
N – No Compromise
T – Teamwork
I – Integrity
F – Fast Communication
Y – Yes to learning
“In anything that we do, any decision at any level, we want these values to inform and guide our paths and how we take care of both customers and the business.”
When it comes to harnessing the power of artificial intelligence, we think that Contify has a pretty strong grasp of how to wield that power for an effective market and competitive intelligence platform. Since Contify can pull information from over 200,000 sources including online news, company websites, social media, and custom sources like regulatory portals, review websites, job boards, and more, users can access a breadth of resources to collect actionable insights for their organization.
Their Taxonomy Builder allows users to categorize and tag the sourced intelligence based on how your business is organized, while other features like the API integrations let users integrate intelligence from their markets into their intranet portals, ERP, CRM, and KM systems.
Contify automates the process of searching, consolidating, and organizing information to generate intelligence for different stakeholders within an organization. Email Alerts allow users to set-up personalized alerts about competitors, customers, and industry topics. While Instant Alerts can swiftly notify teams of mission-critical updates right from their Newsfeed. Other features of note include SmartTranslate, allowing for multiple language support with intelligence coverage from regional sources, and User Analytics which let users analyze the consumption of intelligence by tracking user metrics, organization-wide.
We’re not the only ones excited about this industry-leading AI-enabled market and competitive intelligence platform. After being recognized as one of 2020’s fastest-growing SaaS businesses on our 2020 SaaS 1000 list, Contify earned three badges in the G2 Fall 2020 Grid Report. They were awarded the ‘High performer’ badge, as well as the ‘Users Love Us’ badge and G2 ‘High Performer – Enterprise’ badge.
The need for market intelligence is not new, however, earlier solutions were prohibitively expensive and difficult to navigate. Contify has done a remarkable job in making market intelligence widely accessible. The platform itself is intuitive and the many features allow users to customize its offerings and meet their exact requirements.
