Thinkspeed Receives Seed Funding From Virgo Capital
24th September 2011 · 0 Comments
Thinkspeed, a leading crowd sourced market research platform for the IT industry, announced it has recently received seed funding from Virgo Capital, a private equity firm for software and technology-enabled services companies.
“Each year, $1.5 trillion is spent on enterprise IT purchases. Despite that enormous amount, the main sources of information on product feedback, vendor due diligence, and buying trends are long established methods: mainstream research firms; vendors themselves, or their best customers’ referrals; and personal networks,” said Gautham Viswanathan, Founder and CEO of Thinkspeed.
Thinkspeed, founded in 2010, allows customers to conduct customized studies among the Thinkspeed Research Community, a community of professionals in the IT industry, quickly and cost-effectively. Thinkspeed’s service satisfies the need for decision makers to get targeted feedback and intelligence from those who have expertise in technologies, products, and companies of interest.
“Virgo Capital is a strong partner for Thinkspeed, given their experience in software and services investments,” said Viswanathan. “Our focus is to build a leading service for IT decision makers such as product managers looking to assess new features, IT managers seeking input prior to buying, and corporate development staff performing due diligence on a target’s products.”
Thinkspeed is currently in the latter stages of its beta phase and has conducted a number of pilot studies for clients, who have seen great value in the product. “Thinkspeed helped us get clear, relevant feedback from our customers and other players in the paid search, social and performance display market. The results we received were highly informative and extremely useful across our organization.” said Matt Lawson, Vice President of Marketing at Marin Software.
“Thinkspeed is leading the way in bringing crowd sourcing to the enterprise IT sector,” noted Guhan Swaminathan, Managing Director of Virgo Capital. “The overall market for research and information in the IT sector is in the billions of dollars. Thinkspeed is well-positioned to capture value by allowing companies to get the answers to their specific questions quickly and cost-effectively.”
About Thinkspeed
Thinkspeed offers an innovative crowd-sourced research platform that enables customers to receive direct, targeted, and unbiased feedback from a diverse community of technology professionals. Thinkspeed’s platform makes accessing this community easy, efficient, and cost effective, matching a client’s research specifications with the qualifications of community members and automating the collection and analysis of market intelligence. More information is available at www.thinkspeed.com.
About Virgo Capital
Virgo Capital is a private equity firm with offices in Austin, Texas and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, focused on making control investments in profitable and established software and technology-enabled services companies. Virgo currently manages Virgo Capital Fund I, L.P. which has total capital commitments of nearly $50 million. For information on Virgo Capital, visit www.virgocapital.com.
