Datahug co-founders Ray Smith and Connor Murphy
Irish technology company Datahug has received fresh investment from web software giant Salesforce.com. The company has spearheaded its expansion into the US with the appointment of a new US-based CEO.
Salesforce.com joins existing investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson, DFJ Esprit, Oyster Capital and Silicon Valley investor Ron Conway.
Datahug’s new US-based CEO T Paul Thomas has a history of funding and expanding start-ups.
The company is establishing its US headquarters in San Jose, California, and is in the process of hiring vice-presidents of sales and marketing.
Corkman Connor Murphy co-founded Datahug in Kerry in 2010 while on a sabbatical from PA Consulting as part of the Endeavour programme. He was soon joined by CTO Ray Smith and the company shifted its operations to Dublin.
The company recently won two awards at the prestigious Europas start-up awards in Berlin and last October Datahug secured US$3.2m in Series A financing from Silicon Valley venture capital firm DFJ Esprit. This was on top of the US$1.5m in seed financing the company raised in 2011.
Datahug’s technology mines all the communications data within a company, from email to social media, phone calls, text messages and more, to give the company a greater sense of the relationships it has with existing customers and can have with future customers.
“Expanding more fully into the US market is the main focus of the company this year,” said Thomas. “I’m impressed with the extremely positive response from US investors and customers. Datahug is about using information that already exists within your organisation. The bottom line value of the technology is very clear.”
