Startup Compass raised $3M in Series A Oct 2014. Mattermark closed their Series A in Dec 2014 at $6.5M.
Both will fail. I have already been through both of these and know the flaws in each of their strategies.
Mattermark will coast on investor backing for awhile, but will eventually be overthrown by new market entrants. The first to market is always overthrown. The company is too transparent with their information, too many weaknesses (which is part of the problem with making private company data public & why most entrepreneurs are against it). The hard part will be for new market entrants to take their customers, seeing as though many of their customers are also their investors. It protects them to a certain degree.
Startup Compass, is tackling Mattermark’s core weakness: the fact that they are just reorganizing data. It’s not new data. Startup Compass will end up failing though because A) they’re simply repacking the data for investors, and aren’t being shy about it B) Most failure occurs before a startup is a real “startup”. Startups don’t produce data yet to benchmark against other startups. This is pretty obvious. Between 0-20 employees, you’re just winging it through your internal networks. You don’t really get “tested” by the market until it comes time for you to venture outside your safety zone (network).
Most entrepreneurs are smart enough to know this. It’s truly not rocket science. Those are the one’s who are going to be building high growth companies to begin with.
Another startup popped up, called Signl. They’ll die too because you can’t rate companies based on public social data. I know high growth companies pushing $10M in annual sales their second year, with only 300 likes on Facebook. What would this company score, an F?