US firm FullContact acquires Kochi-based start-up Profoundis

FullContact, a US-based contact management platform for professionals and enterprises, has acquired Profoundis, which is based at Infosys' co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan-backed Startup Village in Kochi, Kerala. Value of the deal was not disclosed.

Profoundis provides technology-enabled human verified data research platforms. FullContact's purchase of Profoundis follows $25 million in new funding, which the company will use to accelerate its growth, recruit global talent and fund further acquisitions.

Funded by a group of angel investors since mid-2015, Profoundis was founded in 2012 by a group of enterprising technology professionals who were batchmates from an engineering institute in Kerala.

The company was the first from Kerala to get selected to the Microsoft Ventures Accelerator programme.

“Our goal is to be the smartest, most comprehensive, and most up-to-date address book on the planet.” said Scott Brave, CTO, FullContact. “The only way to truly achieve that is by integrating the best of human intelligence with machine intelligence. Profoundis is a key element of that strategy.”

FullContact will integrate all of Profoundis’ 70 employees, most of whom will remain in Kochi, into its global workforce and add human-based data research to its growing list of capabilities supporting its strategy for expansion and rapid growth. This combination will establish FullContact as a market leader in data quality and data breadth across its contact management solutions for individual professionals and businesses and have a direct impact on the company’s revenue and sales, he added

“As a strategic partner, Profoundis has been instrumental to adding value and increasing the effectiveness of our data solutions for our clients,” said Bart Lorang, co-founder and CEO of FullContact. “Together we can further accelerate the growth of FullContact as we continue to build the most powerful fully-connected contact management platform for professionals and businesses.”

Arjun R Pillai, Co-founder and CEO of Profoundis who will be FullContact’sHead of Data Strategy. “Becoming part of the FullContact team allows us to further execute on this mission globally, and together, our users will benefit by having more detailed information about their contacts, allowing them to be even more awesome with people."

Currently, FullContact is used by millions of people through its free apps, enterprise customers and API platform partners. With the suite of consumer apps spanning across iOS, Mac, Android, Gmail, and Web, FullContact’s offerings support two-way sync between iCloud, Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Exchange and multiple Google e-mail accounts.