

A week after securing a $25 million funding round from investors, FullContact Inc. is already putting the capital to use. The address book management specialist today acquired a fellow startup called Conspire Inc. that runs a professional social network designed to help workers make new connections.
Its value proposition is similar to LinkedIn’s on the surface, but the implementation is entirely different. Conspire works by plugging into users’ email accounts and analyzing the correspondence inside to identify their most important contacts. Those contacts are then ranked based on the amount of time they’ve been in a worker’s address book, the frequency at which messages are exchanged and how fast a response is typically sent after a new email arrives.
FullContact will incorporate Conspire’s technology into its address book to help busy professionals prioritize the upwards of dozens of people they deal with at any given time. The functionality can come handy in a wide range of different scenarios. Salespeople, for instance, might employ the contact ranking mechanism to quickly find their highest-priority leads, while enterprise workers could use it to ease correspondence with key shareholders in their organizations. And more importantly, Conspire also helps users get in touch with people outside their immediate circle through an indirect connection-making mechanism similar to LinkedIn’s.
Its service uses graph processing algorithms to inform users if a colleague knows someone they might be interested in contacting. This feature has made Conspire popular among startup founders looking to find investors, but FullContact should also be able to apply it in other areas. The technology can be useful for anything from engaging decision-makers in a potential client organization to finding new job opportunities.
FullContact can be expected to add more such value-added features to its service as the competition over workers’ address books continues to intensify. The company is also likely to make additional acquisitions seeing that Conspire is its fourth acquisition in two years. No terms were disclosed for the deal or any of the previous transactions, but the fact that the social networking startup raised over $3.5 million to date suggests it probably fetched a seven-figure payout.
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