Web scraping company Import.io Corp. is hoping to establish itself as a leading player in a somewhat unheralded niche that involves analyzing publicly available data and using it to provide businesses with all manner of useful insights.

Import.io’s optimism stems from its $15.5 million Series B funding round, announced today, which it says will be used to accelerate global growth and expand its product offerings.

The round was led by Talis Capital, which like Import.io, is based in London. Existing investors, including IP Group, OpenOcean, Oxford Capital and Wellington Partners, also participated in the round.

Import.io’s proposition is a simple but also very useful one. The company provides a visual interface that businesses can use to scrape data from websites that don’t provide an easy way of doing so. Import.io then makes the results of this “scraping” available through a centralized programming interface, allowing its customers to use the data they’ve collected for a wide range of applications.

Examples of these use cases include training artificial intelligence systems. StoryFit uses Import.io to scan the web for data to train its natural language processing systems. The service is also popular with numerous retail firms that use it for “competitive intelligence mining,” which involves monitoring competitor’s websites for things such as inventory and pricing.

Import.io said its service is likely to become more useful to its customers as they become increasingly more data-driven. It reckons they can use alternative sources of data to gain an important competitive advantage, and it wants to be the main provider of this kind of data.

“Businesses around the world are losing trillions of dollars due to lack of timely access to high-quality data,” said Import.io Chief Executive Officer Gary Read. “[We’re] committed to providing timely, high-quality data with little-to-no customer resource requirements.”

Image: Import.io/Facebook