• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, October 24, 2014

Zignal Labs executives have convinced a handful of investors to infuse $10.7 million in their analytics company, which they say makes it easy to convert lots of raw data into actionable metrics. The Series B funding round was led by existing investors Andy Ballard, managing partner of Figtree Partners; Mitchell Cohen, manager of Ross Investment Associates; and Jim Hornthal, co-founder and chairman of Zignal Labs.

The investment adds to a previous Series A funding of $4.2. The company will use the funds to grow its leadership, sales, and engineering teams, as well as deliver build out features for its next-generation analytics and insights platform, per co-founder Adam Beaugh. "Companies can bring in data, but what you do with the data after you bring it in makes the difference," he said.

On its list of clients, the Sacramento Kings tapped Zignal's tools to better understand its fans. The Kings used the analytics platform to gain insights on key issues, sentiments and trends surrounding domestic and international media coverage of the team, as well as chatter on social media.

Zignal's technology allows companies to search and find the origin of the story, automates processes, and reduces the time to reduce reports and impact summaries. Beaugh said a Silicon Valley tech company needed to know where a story on regulatory issues directed toward them came from. The story didn't break in The Washington Post or New York Times. Those publications were picking it up. "In three seconds we were able to track the original story back to a random blogger in New Zealand, who didn't have a ton of followers," he said.

Reports and impact summaries traditionally takes seven hours manually, but the system does it in 10 seconds and then turns the reports into PDFs within a minute, Beaugh said.

"Stacks of Money" photo from Shutterstock.