SaaS For SMBs: InsightSquared Picks Up $4.5M From Atlas, Bessemer, Salesforce and NextView

As the software-as-a-service market continues to mature, there are companies emerging that are targeting specific sectors within the enterprise with solutions especially tailored and priced for them: the latest of these is InsightSquared, which has announced a Series A round of $4.5 million for its a business intelligence platform aimed specifically at small and medium-sized businesses.

The round was led by Atlas Venture, with participation also from NextView Ventures and new investors Bessemer Venture Partners and Salesforce.com. This brings total funding in the company since February 2011 to $5.5 million.

As part of the news, InsightSquared is also announcing that it is integrating with Salesforce for the latter company’s visualization services to be integrated into the service.

Other services included in InsightSquared fall firmly in the category of data analysis — typically the kind used by large enterprises and now becoming more affordable and accessible to smaller businesses, by way of the SaaS business model. They include activity tracking (dashboards to track activity from employees and clients in real-time, with trending options); sales forecasts; data quality monitoring (identifying, ranking and fixing data errors); ratios and KPIs; nightly emails; employee scorecards ranking each worker against his peers; tagging and filtering and integration with other data sources (eg voice tracking with M5 Networks); financial tracking and web tracking (with Google Analytics).

These services are offered in packages that begin at $99 per month, says the company.

The basic premise of InsightSquared is that data intelligence requirements for SMBs are different to those from larger enterprises — not just in terms of the kind of data that is covered, but in how the service is priced — because, as those who work with the SMB sector know, it is one of the most price-sensitive segments of all in the enterprise market.

“The requirements for making data intelligence useful to small and mid-sized businesses are much different than that of large enterprises,” Fred Shilmover, co-founder and CEO of InsightSquared, said in a statement. “Our product is built with usability, data integrity and simple workflow as the central focuses. Consequently, our cost-benefit proposition for the SMB market is compelling.”

Like its investor and partner Salesforce, InsightSquared is geared mainly at productivity and services around sales teams and those that are customer-facing in their businesses. Up to now, judging from the company’s publicly-disclosed customer list, it has made some inroads, through an integration with Bullhorn, into working with companies in the recruitment sector, with companies like Hireminds, Vertek, I-Technology and Hiregy among their customers.