FullContact Expands Footprint with Acquisition of Profoundis in Kerala

FullContact, a US-based provider of the most powerful contact management platform for professionals and enterprises, today announced the acquisition of Profoundis, a Kerala, India-based provider of technology enabled human verifieddata research platform.This is the first-of-its-kind acquisition in Kerala’s startup community.

 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 at the College of Engineering, Chengannur, Kerala. Based at Startup Village, Kochi, the company was the first company from Kerala to get selected to the Microsoft Ventures Accelerator programand one of the three companies to get selected for ‘Start-Up Chile’, an initiative by the Chilean Government in 2013.

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.

“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.

“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.”

“With Profoundis, we were on a mission to help businesses do better by providing additional contextual data about organizations and people,” said 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 email accounts.

 "The acquisition of Profoundis marks a key milestone for Kerala and its startup community,” said Keyur Patel, Chairman of Profoundis and Founder, Chairman of Fuse Global Ltd. “It also indicates the growing maturity of startup teams in the enterprise space and showcases the global cultural and technological synergies that are evolving. FullContact is the fastest emerging player in the contact management space and picking Profoundis to become part of its growth clearly shows the value each company can derive over the coming years at a global scale.”