San Francisco-based Breadcrumbs closed a $5.4 million seed round, looking to grow its platform that helps companies get the most out of its customer base.

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The round was led by Blue Canyon, with participation from Active Capital, Primo Ventures, Hustle Fund, Stormbreaker and several angel investors.

The company — founded just as the pandemic lockdowns began last year — sits at the intersection of sales and marketing. Its “lead scoring” platform ingests a variety of data points to help companies rate and score current and potential customers — helping drive customer acquisition, retention and upselling, said CEO Armando Biondi.

Biondi openly admits the lead scoring space is an “unsexy” aspect of sales and marketing and is a little “inside baseball,” but also something companies have looked at for more than 15 years and especially now as “revenue acceleration” has become its own buzz word in the industry.

“This is a problem that should have been solved by now,” Biondi said. “If there was already a company doing this well, I would have invested in them instead of starting my own company.”

Old problem, new data

While the problem of lead scoring is not new, Biondi said Breadcrumbs takes a different approach to the issue. While many platforms rely on basic data when scoring a customer — like revenue or employee count — Breadcrumbs takes in more data points, including aspects such as online engagements, and helps company’s sales teams know when the time may be right to make contact.

Large sales and marketing platforms such as Salesforce1 , Marketo and HubSpot have similar basic offerings, and new startups like Mountain View, California-based MadKudu also play in the space, but mainly go after the enterprise market, he said, adding that Breadcrumbs sees the evolving space of lead scoring as something every company can use and that must work with more dynamic data to be useful.

Breadcrumbs publicly launched six months ago and has about a half dozen B2B SaaS customers, Biondi said. The 15-person company will use the new money to build out integration on large sales and marketing platforms, as well try to educate revenue departments about the emerging space.

The company already is in talks with companies like HubSpot for partnerships, he said.

Pat Matthews, CEO and founder of Active Capital, said he was intrigued by Breadcrumbs because every company is looking to do more with data and drive revenue, but there are few off-the-shelf solutions that can do that.

“They turn noise into opportunity and opportunity into revenue,” he said.

Breadcrumbs is not Biondi’s first chance to grow a company. He co-founded AdEspresso, which was sold to social media managing platform Hootsuite in 2017 for an undisclosed amount. Biondi can see even more for his new venture.

“We would love Breadcrumbs to be even bigger,” he said.

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias.