BizPortal: Corporate Data and Public Tenders Intelligence Startup Raises €1.7M
BizPortal, founded in 2013 in Sofia open data mining and analytics solutions provider, has just announced a new investment round. The governmentally backed VC Morningside Hill together with local business angels invested €1.7M in the venture to boost the productization of its services and the market position strengthening.
“In the past years, over 90% of our revenues come from clients abroad, mostly in the UK and Benelux who we provide with data intelligence predominantly used for credit ratings. Now with this investment, we are planning to further scale our offering, package it as a platform and target the US market,” summarizes the plans of the company co-founder Andrey Davidov. Alongside the data mining services, BizPortal has been ongoingly working on the platform Tender Alpha, which is also the product that the investment is going in.
BizPortal is the second company in the portfolio of Morningside Hill, who are putting €1M in it. Managing partner Pavel Velkov is convinced that what the founders are building could have a great return on investment even earlier than expected. “The platform is interesting because it already has international exposure and solid domain expertise in an area that our team understands well – hedge funds. I see BizPortal’s potential to be acquired by a large fund or a Wall Street intermediary in several years,” says Velkov.
From public tenders in Bulgaria to serving 50+ markets
Indeed, the company was once started under BizPortal.bg with the idea to provide the local business with daily updates about available grants and public procurement procedures. It was founded by Andrey Davidov, Martin Tsanov and Vladimir Kuzmov. Today, the platform is still active and provides local business with daily notifications about different business opportunities – ongoing public tenders, predictions of when tenders may be open, information about trade fairs, and grants.
With time and experience, however, and thanks to a big client who appeared in 2015, BizPortal changed course a bit adding more services, use cases, and more markets. Today, the team of 20 people based in Sofia has developed open data mining and analytics solutions that collect and process global public procurement contract data from 50 countries in Europe, the Americas, and Asia. The contract information and the archives that go back to 2010 are scraped from government publications, harmonized and mapped to awarded company names, stock tickers, parent and subsidiaries corporate data links.
With all the data collected and developments based on customers’ feedback and needs, BizPortal has also launched Tender Alpha – a global data product consisting of aggregated government procurement contract awards and the related company information from more than 50 countries worldwide. On the platform, companies can subscribe and receive different types of data and analysis. “This product is especially appealing in the alternative data market and funds that are trading on the stock exchange,” explains Andrey Davidov. TenderAlpha provides the only ticker-mapped global public contracts data product with market signaling information on nearly 7 000 stocks involved in government contracting.
Between governmental business opportunities and transparency
Actually, for BizPortal it all started with the idea to help companies grow their governmental business. With time, however, the use cases and the applications of the data they collected and analyzed developed. The company has even participated in projects related to exposing corruption practices. The main use cases, however, are providing data for credit ratings, macroeconomic and public expenditure monitoring, up-to-date info about public tenders to support the B2G efforts of companies, market and competition analyses. With the recent development, BizPortal is now also providing funds with data about the tenders that publicly traded companies are being awarded and boost the funds trading algorithms – the product and its US launch that Morningside Hill and the business angels in the round actually backed.
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