Last week TMT Investments, a UK-headquartered venture fund backed by Russian businessmen, announced the completion of a $200,000 investment in Whale Path, a Sunnyvale, California-based startup that offers an on-demand business research platform for companies.
Whale Path says it typically delivers fully customized reports to its clients three times faster and at half the price compared to traditional business research vendors. Whale Path streamlines the entire research process, which allows its clients to receive tailored reports within two weeks.
According to the American Marketing Association, in 2013 over $24 billion was spent on research by over 3.8 million corporate executives in the USA. At the same time, Whale Path believes business research today is incredibly expensive, poorly customized, and produced too slowly.
Whale Path was co-founded by Artem Gassan and Colin Gu in 2012. Prior to Whale Path, Artem founded Viestly and World Market Media, as well as served as interim COO of iBuildApp. Colin previously worked at VMware and SAP and has strong user- experience design and development skills.
TMT, which is listed on the London Stock Exchange, has raised $28 million since its inception in 2010. Its portfolio includes more than 30 startups from the USA, Russia and other countries. Among them are software publisher rollApp, self-service video network Virool, mobile advertising network Adinch, online service for publishers Graphicly, software publisher Pipedrive, farm management solution developer WeatherMe OÜ, and event planning app developer KitApps.
The fund’s latest investment, last month, went to Israeli startup Drippler, which offers a mobile and web-based discovery service helping people adopt everyday technology.
