Visualping, a service that can help you monitor websites for changes like price drops or other updates, announced that it has raised a $6 million extension to the $2 million seed round it announced earlier this year. The round was led by Seattle-based FUSE, a relatively new firm with investors who spun out of Ignition Partners last year. Prior investors Mistral Venture Partners and N49P also participated.
The Vancouver-based company is part of the current Google for Startups Accelerator class in Canada. This program focuses on services that leverage AI and machine learning, and, while website monitoring may not seem like an obvious area where machine learning can add a lot of value, if you’ve ever used one of these services, you know that they can often unleash a plethora of false alerts. For the most part, after all, these tools simply look for something in a website’s underlying code to change and then trigger an alert based on that (and maybe some other parameters you’ve set).
Image Credits: Visualping
Earlier this week, Visualping launched its first machine learning-based tools to avoid just that. The company argues that it can eliminate up to 80% of false alerts by combining feedback from its more than 1.5 million users with its new ML algorithms. Thanks to this, Visualping can now learn the best configuration for how to monitor a site when users set up a new alert.
“Visualping has the hearts of over a million people across the world, as well as the vast majority of the Fortune 500. To be a part of their journey and to lead this round of financing is a dream,” FUSE’s Brendan Wales said.
Visualping founder and CEO Serge Salager tells me that the company plans to use the new funding to focus on building out its product but also to build a commercial team. So far, he said, the company’s growth has been primarily product led.
As a part of these efforts, the company also plans to launch Visualping Business, with support for these new ML tools and additional collaboration features, and Visualping Personal for individual users who want to monitor things like ticket availability for concerts or to track news, price drops or job postings, for example. For now, the personal plan will not include support for ML. “False alerts are not a huge problem for personal use as people are checking two-three websites but a huge problem for enterprise where teams need to process hundreds of alerts per day,” Salager told me.
The current idea is to launch these new plans in November, together with mobile apps for iOS and Android. The company will also relaunch its extensions around this time, too.
It’s also worth noting that while Visualping monetizes its web-based service, you can still use the extension in the browser for free.