Soleadify is now Veridion, with $6 million further to its name

Soleadify, the Romania-based "firmographic" database operator dealing with over 80 million company profiles, updated weekly, is getting a brand makeover.

Enter Veridion, the newly-branded company backed with a $6 million late seed fundraising to expand business for its AI-driven data tools, which specifically are taught to better index and contextualise business information, thanks to advances in machine learning and natural language processing.

The late seed round follows Soleadify's $1.5 million seed in 2020, with Day One Capital and GapMind Venture Partners returning to invest. They're joined by new shareholders LAUNCHub Ventures, OTB Ventures and Underline Ventures.

Veridion says it will benefit from a runway to expand into the US, while also continuing build-out of its proprietary business directory AIs.

"We believe that the next generation of business decision engines, regardless of industry or vertical will require a completely new format of data," said Florin Tufan, CEO and founder.

"Predictive models will rely on AI more than human intuition and will be capable of processing exponentially more data as their core resource. For this, the data needs to be fresh, granular, easy to work with, and integrate-able across a wide array of processes.

"This has been our focus from the beginning and with this round, we’ll be able to double down on our approach.”

Firmographic data, in Veridion's eyes, means any information that categorises a business operation, from business activity to product outlooks, locations, number of employees and underlying tech in use by the company.

Bringing insights from that data into decision-making has been difficult, as legacy tech can include outdated data scraped from the public web. According to Gartner, a typical company loses around $12.9 million a year on bad data insights.

Veridion must also stay ahead of fellow AI in business categorisation companies looking to resolve similar business information use cases, like Delphai, Planck Data and Grata.

Its provided data suggests the business information market was valued at $211 billion, and could top $291 billion by 2027 driven by AI and other emerging technologies.

Veridion is claiming to offer the highest "data refresh rate" and more company records than its main competitors, along with a broader scope than say Delphai, which largely limits its coverage to M&A, prospecting and supplier sourcing.

"Access to accurate and timely company data opens a new way to success in today's business landscape," says Rumen Iliev, partner, LAUNCHub, "It equips smart enterprises with the knowledge and understanding necessary to outcompete their competitors. By leveraging the power of Veridion's algorithms and AI, Data Teams across the globe are able to gather firmographic data with speed, accuracy, and coverage that surpasses human capabilities."

There's a lot of scope for business intelligence, but Veridion says it has witnessed abundant demand from public consultancies and market intelligence firms. These customers have reported some decent results, with Veridion's platform claimed to have saved "thousands of hours" in manual research.

Veridion has done a ton of validation work in multiple fields, like commercial underwriting, discovering new suppliers and supporting private deal market analysis. The platform is structured as a set of self-service APIs, allowing companies to choose how they fit alongside specific internal objectives.

With the rebrand now out in the open, Veridion is continuing its programme of expansion in the US and will launch New York offices this year, catering to clients in the surrounding area.  A US-based law firm, Cytowski & Partners, advised Veridion on the latest seed transaction.