Romanian company Soleadify — also known as Veridion — which is developing a global database with contact details of small businesses around the globe, announced it raised $6mn in a late seed round to expand to the US and further develop its AI technology.

The company says it uses AI instead of mere bots to extract content and data from websites. According to its press release, it is one of the first companies to deploy AI at this scale for data acquisition, which sets it apart from the traditional firmographic data players that buy data from government registries as well as simple web-scraping alternative data providers.

It raised the seed round from LAUNCHub Ventures, OTB Ventures, Underline Ventures, and existing investors Day One Capital and GapMinder Venture Partners.

In previous rounds, the company raised $3mn.

The first to bet on the project were Matei Pavel — the former head of two of the founders of T-Me Studios, an Android application publisher that was later taken over by an American company, Monica Obogeanu and Bogdan Iordache.

The Romanian startup said that it plans to continue building its US footprint by opening a New York office in 2023. 

Soleadify, renamed Veridion (but not on the US market where it remains Soleadify), specialises in firmographic data and maintains a weekly-updated database of over 80mn company profiles. Its data covers business aspects such as identification, contacts, locations and classification by product offerings, and ESG topics.

Veridion says it uses AI “to revolutionise big data and to comprehend billions of webpages every week in order to build and maintain a highly accurate, global scale, near real-time, the single-source-of-truth database of company data made available through a Complex Search API and a Matching & Enriching API.”