With $10 Million in New Venture Funding, Philly’s LeadiD Becomes Jornaya

Jornaya launched its new website on Wednesday. Photo courtesy of Jornaya.

Five years ago, the startup LeadiD recognized a void in the sales lead marketplace — there was no transparency between companies buying and selling leads, the pieces of insight gleaned about prospective consumers. Companies like the local car dealership, for example, had no idea how likely a prospective customer was to eventually buy a car. Some companies were essentially in the dark about consumer intent.

LeadiD sought to tackle this information gap at its inception in 2011, but now, five years later, the technology platform they’ve built has grown faster than expected, offering insights about a consumer’s buying process, or journey, that goes far beyond leads.

On Wednesday, the company said its brand finally caught up to the intelligence it’s been building up all along, and in a symbolic move shed its original name for the more fitting, “Jornaya,” and announced that it secured $10 million in a Series B funding round.

“The rebranding wasn’t a vain exercise of wanting a different name,” said Ross Shanken, the founder and CEO of the consumer purchase journey insights platform, “we’re more pragmatic than that.”

Instead, the company says “Jornaya” is more inclusive of all of the information they now provide clients, including Liberty Mutual, Plymouth Rock Assurance, and DeVry University. Jornaya’s predictive analytics platform can do a lot more than what it did five years ago.

For one, the company says it can determine where an individual is in the purchasing process and also an individual’s intent to buy. Rather than just analyzing leads on a per event basis, Jornaya follows consumers on their buying journeys until the end, when a consumer makes a purchasing decision. This means they can know how close someone is to buying a car from the local dealership, for example, because they’ve been tracking that consumer’s purchasing habits all along. They also say the platform can even offer insights about whether a consumer made a considered purchase or one on the spur of the moment, helping companies make smarter decisions about how to direct consumers.

And this works in the consumer’s favor, too, Jornaya says, enabling the brand to interact with them in a way that’s more relevant to how they make decisions and how far along in the buying journey they may be.

The startup has also made way with compliance. With the proliferation of information sharing and mobile communication, consumers are prone to getting those pesky unwanted phone calls from companies looking to get them to spend. But often times consumers are just not ready to interact with a sales representative and Jornaya’s technology can let advertisers know where a consumer is, Shanken said.

While consumers get a break, Jornaya’s platform gives companies perhaps an even bigger one, by helping clients avoid costly litigation through class action lawsuits. “Jornaya’s technology can help clients track back to the point at which a consumer gave consent to be contacted,” says vice president of marketing, Adam Figueira.

Jornaya realizes that it collects a lot of information, but part of their value proposition is helping companies sift through it to discover what matters. “There are a lot of data points and we collect the dots to help companies connect the dots and make the right decisions,” said Shanken.

Over the last five years, the company says it has witnessed more than four billion consumer interactions and has lodged itself deep in several sectors including education, insurance, mortgage, and solar energy and is present across 25,000 different web properties, supporting over 450 clients.

Princeton-based Edison Partners led the $10 million Series B funding round that will allow Jornaya to keep expanding. “The venture capitalist community recognizes that we’re growing and that there’s a growing need for the type of data and technology we are providing,” Shanken said. “[The investment will help us] bring this value sooner to a broader set of companies that can benefit.”

Under its previous name, the company raised $9.7 million, including a $7 million Series A led by Comcast Ventures.

Shanken, who was born and raised in Philadelphia, says there was never a question of where he would grow or start the company, which currently employs 60 people. “We’re adding growth to the tech community and our people like being here.”

Moving forward, Shanken says challenges are something they’ll come up against and they’re prepared to be bombarded with panic from people asking if LeadiD has gone out of business.

“We aren’t changing our name because we’re running away. We built a great brand in LeadiD. Now we are reflecting the opportunity we have to help the markets we serve, said Shanken, “This is exciting for our customers and the promise of the future is great for us.”

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