Robocog known for its flagship recruitment search engine HiringSolved, is releasing their latest creation Expanded.IO, a data mining platform for lead generation, in beta July 15.
In addition, they recently closed on $2.5 million round led by private investors outside of Arizona, bringing their total funding to $3.5 million.
Co-founder Robocog, Shon Burton, said the raise will be used for sales and marketing expansion for HiringSolved and a good chunk for Expanded.IO development.
The new product Expanded.IO takes some of the search engine technology from HiringSolved and adds a considerable amount of new data mining and predictive code to bring efficiency and organization to live crawling.
Expanded.IO’s platform uses public data on the web to find information about a person such as their personal or company email, social networks, and much more.
“If it’s not in Google or Bing, we aren’t going to find it,” Burton said.
The difference between Expanded.IO and other data services Burton said is how their algorithms organize the data and the confidence scoring provided on each piece of acquired data.
“[The platform], gives a score or rating on the confidence that the information is correct and it’s the actual person,” Burton said.
Burton said the platform has three main use cases for customers: gaining more insight to a group of people, updating a database, and adding more data, such as social networks, to current lists.
The benefit of this platform is that one doesn’t have to be a programmer to use the interface. The company has designed the program to fill in data even if the user has a minimal amount of information about the individual such as a name and company.
Burton gave an example of how Expanded.IO could help a 5K race organizer reconnect with past participants. “Sometimes the only information they get on a runner is their name. With Expanded.IO, they can fill in all the missing data about the runners and retarget them for the next event or products and services,” Burton explains.
For customers that have a robust list, the platform has a CSV uploader that allows companies to input their information and the engine will fill in the remaining data.
The magic behind Expanded.IO comes from “the ability to correlate information and distilling it-that is where data science and machine learning [comes in],” Burton said.
With Expanded.IO’s ability to acquire a vast amount of information about a person, the intention of use by customers and privacy is a priority for the company.
“We take privacy seriously. The most complex thing is trying to understand where the privacy limits are, what to let the customer control, and how we should responsibly convey that,” Burton said. Unfortunately, “data access gets easier everyday.”
With regard to accessing ones’ social media sites, “we aren’t going into your Facebook and looking at your pictures, it’s only the Facebook URL, that’s as deep as it goes,” Burton said.
While there will always be people using public data for nefarious reasons, the platform has the ability to help law enforcement and become the “Robot Magnum PI,” as Burton said.
During the Beta phase the company will be inviting 50 users to test out the product; the public can sign up for early access. Pricing will be based on the number of records uploaded.
Web crawling to find information about a person is one thing, but using it to understand and predict behavior is the next level of data mining, Burton said.
“We are just on the cusp of connecting all of this information and using data science to tell us how to motivate people,” Burton said.
Read more coverage on HiringSolved at AZ Tech Beat.
Sign up for early access of Expanded.IO here.
Graphics provided by Expanded.IO
