OMERS Ventures Invests $500K in LeadSift

Earlier this month, OMERS Ventures invested a cool $500,000 into a start-up company called Leadsift. As the name suggests, Leadsift is designed to produce high-quality sales leads that companies can use to find willing customers and clients, which is one of the key components to any successful business. Although half a million dollars might seem like a sizable chunk of cash for a start-up company, the sales leads it produces alone could be well worth the cost. Here we’ll take a closer look at this latest investment and reveal whether or not it was worth the price.

Unless you’re an IT professional or someone who keeps up with the news surrounding deals like this, chances are you’ve never even heard of LeadSift before. So, what makes this company so special that OMERS Ventures would be willing to invest $500,000 in it? In short, they’ve developed a piece of software that goes through all of the social media data out there and translates it into ready-to-use leads. Companies can either use their software directly or use the leads it generates to find potential customers and clients for their business.

With the growth of social media sites like Facebook, Myspace and Twitter, there are literally hundreds of millions of accounts updated on a daily basis. Some of these accounts are used by businesses professionals to connect with other like-minded business professionals, while others are used simply for personal reasons. Companies can use this to their advantage by using a service like LeadSift to go through this data and translate it into something that benefits their business.

Without going into too much detail, LiftSift is able to generate ready-to-use data from social media accounts by a comprehensive series of spiders, bots and third-party services that frequently scan accounts on the web. When someone updates their account with a new status, LeadSift is able to find this update and translate it into their software. They can then use this information to find potential clients and customers based on the information listed on their social media account. For instance, a lawn maintenance company would be interested in leads from homeowners living in a certain area, which LeadSift can acquire for their customers.

After the investment was made, LeadSift made an announcement to the press saying that they will use the $500,000 by OMERS Ventures for product development, sales and marketing, all of which are designed to expand their business.