Lead generation platform Cognism has raised £9.4M in funding by AXA Venture Partners and PeakSpan Capital to further expand its European growth. To date, Cognism has opened an office in New York and three offices in the UK, Europe and Asia. The company has also recruited former Head of AI at Bloomberg James Hodson as its Chief Science Officer.
Powered by AI and machine learning, the startup provides organisations with compliant B2B data and a suite of sales acceleration tools. Currently, the company works with 500 businesses worldwide to deliver new revenue faster. Cognism has grown over 150% year on year and expects that to continue.
“I’m delighted that AXA Venture Partners is investing in Cognism. It’s a ringing endorsement of how hard everyone in the company has worked to make us Europe’s leading go-to-market data provider. At Cognism, we have always wanted to do things differently, from providing innovative solutions to our clients’ lead generation challenges to remaining committed to full compliance with the GDPR. No other business in our space can boast of these achievements. Our partnership with AXA ensures that Cognism is a debt-free company and affords us a short runway to profitability in 2021.” - James Isilay, CEO at Cognism
AXA Venture Partners has a long history of investing in talented and ambitious entrepreneurs and outstanding companies. Cognism plans to use the AXA funding to open more offices across Europe and sharpen its localised regulatory expertise to meet its goal of setting the global standard for data compliance in the future.
“Cognism’s integrated data and software platform solves major pain points in the B2B marketing and sales workflow and it didn’t take long for us to get excited about what the team have built. We are excited to help in this next phase of international expansion and partnerships and it’s exactly in our core focus stage of growth.” - Imran Akram, General Partner at AXA Venture Partners
