Canopy Labs Inc., which helps mid-sized businesses build predictive customer models to prioritize sales leads and identify high-value customers, announced it closed a $1.5 million investment led by the BDC Venture Capital IT Fund with participation by Peter Thiel's Valar Ventures and a number of angel investors. A recent graduate of the Y Combinator program, the company will use the funds to scale operations and launch new analytics products.

"Mid-sized businesses don't need expensive, customized solutions to analyze and segment their customer records," said Canopy Labs CEO Wojciech Gryc. "We offer our clients insights into their customer data that marketing or sales analysts can understand and use right away to make customers happier and increase their sales. We've launched analytics capabilities for our clients in under 24 hours."

According to industry analyst IDC, the overall worldwide big data technology and services market is expected to grow from $3.2 billion in 2010 to $16.9 billion in 2015, representing a compound annual growth rate of 40 percent. Canopy Labs estimates there are approximately 90,000 mid-sized businesses that could use the company's analytics platform.

Canopy Labs helps consumer and retail enterprises with a large customer base prioritize efforts and deliver different marketing messages to different customers. This results in a more personalized sales experience and higher revenue. Customer modeling case studies have shown that the Canopy Labs platform is capable of processing three million records within minutes, increase sales leads by 25%, and increase sales conversions by 200%.

Canopy Labs' self-serve platform creates customer models by importing all of the interactions that a business has with its customers. Everything from email, social media, voicemail and call center recordings are analyzed with the products that customers buy and how much they paid for these products. Canopy Labs clients are then provided recommended actions for each customer without a sales rep having to reflect upon each customer, thus saving time for the company while decreasing customer churn and increasing customer spend.

"Many analytics companies say they can solve tough problems but most IT projects in enterprises fail or end up stagnating," said Ron Warburton, managing partner at the BDC Venture Capital IT Fund. "Canopy Labs has found a way to address a very clear problem for enterprises that don't want to hire consultants or create customized customer modeling programs - streamlining their analytics process and delivering smart, usable data in a very short timeframe."

The platform is available on a software-as-a-service model, designed to scale as a client's analytics needs grow. Companies interested in using the platform should contact Canopy Labs directly.

ABOUT CANOPY LABS

Based in Toronto, Canopy Labs provides lead optimization tools and customer models to mid-sized customer-facing businesses wanting to understand their customer feedback, decrease customer churn, increase customer lifetime value and deliver a personalized sales experience to tens of thousands of customers. Canopy Labs is founded by a team with deep expertise in mathematical and predictive modelling: CEO Wojciech Gryc is a former McKinsey consultant and Rhodes Scholar; and chief scientist Jorge Escobedo has a PhD in Theoretical Physics and researched string theory. For more information, see http://www.canopylabs.com

ABOUT VALAR VENTURES

Valar Ventures is a global venture capital firm backed by Peter Thiel. Based in San Francisco, Valar invests exclusively in companies outside of the United States. Valar believes that over the next decade an increasing number of transformative technology companies will be started outside of the US, and that the founders of those companies will benefit from having a US partner that understands their unique challenges and opportunities and can help them access US networks. See http://www.valarventures.com

ABOUT THE BDC VENTURE CAPITAL IT FUND

The BDC Venture Capital IT Fund invests in emerging Canadian IT companies with passionate entrepreneurs whose ventures can disrupt existing industries or create entirely new markets. We lead the majority of our investments, which are typically early stage start-ups focused on the Enterprise, Internet, or Mobile sectors. With offices in Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and Calgary, we use our broad network and operational backgrounds to help promising IT companies become global leaders. The fund has invested in a number of successful companies, including Radian6 (acquired by Salesforce), Opalis (acquired by Microsoft), Bycast (acquired by NetApp) and Q1 Labs (acquired by IBM). Visit our website at http://www.bdc.ca/EN/solutions/venture_capital/our_team/direct_investment/Pages/information_tech.aspx