How BizMachine Collects and Interprets Company Data

Company data and business databases may sound incredibly boring, but the opposite is true. When you collect the right data and know how to connect it, you gain surprising insights you wouldn’t otherwise see. And that’s precisely the domain of Karlín-based Data-as-a-Service startup BizMachine. “We collect data about who has a company electric vehicle, how large a company’s IT department is, when a company last searched for employees, whether it has a growing e-shop, or whether you’re a reliable VAT payer. On their own, even these facts carry some informational value. But often the real gold only appears when you cleverly combine multiple data sources. And that’s exactly what we do: Find the sources and data connections that help segment your specific market, prioritize business opportunities, or better understand your commercial potential,” says BizMachine co-founder and current CEO, Martin Ondáš.

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BizMachine can go into great detail. For example, it can determine not only how many Tesla cars are owned by Czech companies, or how many of those belong to e-shop operators, but also how many of those e-shop operators have other “green technologies” besides Tesla. With this data, you can target a specific campaign — say, for selling eco-friendly packaging materials — far more precisely than if you carpet-bombed all e-shop operators. BizMachine also has data on shell companies, or for example on companies that received investment grants. For ordinary people, these are at most interesting tidbits. But for those who sell their goods and services to other businesses, BizMachine can be tremendously helpful. It can combine data from publicly available sources — thanks to the deep insight and broad perspective of the consultants who work at BizMachine — and combine this information to deliver high added value in the sales process.

Data alone isn’t enough. It must deliver added value

Several players on the market create databases with company information from dozens of public sources. “Having and finding the data itself may not be that interesting, but when you connect it properly, it delivers enormous value. And that’s what we focus on,” explains Martin Ondáš, one of the founders of BizMachine.

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‍Data from BizMachine is already structured and ready for various filtering, integration with your own CRM, or other analytical work. “So while previously only a really large company could afford to use similar data — one that also had a superman on the team who searches for data, cleans it, analyzes it, and manually connects or updates it — today you can use our platform. There you also have access to a large number of “semi-finished products” — business signals that are regularly updated automatically. So instead of an analytics expert, even a less experienced person will do — often it can be your salesperson directly, without BI specialization — who can assemble a view of your entire market or create a list of companies for a targeted campaign from available data and semi-finished products in a matter of hours. So you can start using data immediately for your sales. Our platforms are accessible to everyone. Even people who aren’t data scientists. Simply put, a salesperson must be able to see at first glance information they can use from the first client contact through maintaining long-term relationships,” adds Martin Ondáš.

Not just rich data, but business understanding and consulting work

It might seem that BizMachine is a company full of nerds passionate about data analysis and online tool development. But this image doesn’t represent how BizMachine truly operates. While data engineers, data scientists, and the entire development team absolutely prioritize the quality of data used and platform user-friendliness, everyone primarily keeps in mind the added value of what they do. Collecting, cleaning, and updating data that would be useless in the sales process would never even occur to anyone at BizMachine.

Martin Ondáš on the criteria for selecting which data to include in their database: “Our clients, with whom we’re constantly in contact, are our inspiration. We solve specific problems for them, questions that often neither we nor they know the answers to. And the fact that we ourselves are interested in how to answer new questions, what data could help us, and where to get it, leads us to new paths and sources that can be connected to the platform. Often, thanks to clients, we discover there’s a way to interpret a data source we didn’t know about before. At the same time, we work closely and long-term with clients. Thanks to their feedback, we can improve and iterate data for them, which moves us all forward together.”

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“I’m also proud of our consultants and analysts. They deeply understand sales processes in the industries they cover. They think “in business terms,” so they themselves seek out what data and interpretations could be useful for salespeople in a given industry. So anyone dealing with a business problem can come to us. They don’t need to know anything about data or data sources. And my colleagues will find a way to streamline that business process with them. Perhaps I should mention that we’re happy to connect data from our platform to our clients’ internal systems and data, creating additional very interesting added value. Our work doesn’t end with providing data to our clients or preparing custom segmentation for them. Quite the opposite. We require their feedback. Only then can we improve and iterate databases, which moves us forward. We also have advanced clients — successful companies in their industries — with specific requirements. They already have enormous amounts of their own data, but they need to enrich it, make sense of it, and use it correctly. And that’s our role. We also help BI departments work with data. They push us to the limits of what we can still discover and analyze. And we love them for it.,” adds Ondáš.

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Let’s add that BizMachine was founded by three Martins — besides Ondáš, also Nepraš and Lucky. They all first met at the consulting firm McKinsey. In 2016, however, they decided to start building their own business because they realized that on their projects they constantly needed to mine similar data sources again and again and add business value to them. Doing it from scratch every time seemed like a waste of time. So they decided to try a different approach. Without investor help, BizMachine grew to last year’s revenue of 37 million CZK with a 20-member team of data enthusiasts. Their services and tools are used by over 300 customers, including smaller local companies as well as international players like Siemens, Allegro, or Cisco. They have a platform accessible to anyone who wants to use data to streamline their B2B sales or marketing, as well as a team of skilled business consultants who can advise on what data to use and how to use it for any given business assignment.