Crayon Inc., which provides a cloud service that helps companies such as Salesforce.com Inc. spot opportunities to gain an edge over competitors, has closed a $22 million funding round by Baird Capital.

The Boston-based startup said today that it will use the financing to support growth initiatives. Crayon is hoping to double its nearly 100-person team over the next 12 months and will also use some of the new funding to build more features for its cloud service.

Through the service, Crayon provides its corporate customers with more than a hundred different types of data about the competitors in their markets. Crayon detects events such as when a rival launches a new product line or lowers prices. The startup says that its algorithms can gather much more fine-grained market information as well. 

For sales departments, Crayon finds data points that can potentially be used to win over clients from competing firms. The startup says its service analyzes information from online reviews of competitors’ products, public documentation for those products and other sources to reveal feature gaps in their offerings.

Crayon targets other departments besides sales as well. Business teams, the startup says, can use its service to glean new details about competitors’ product roadmaps and channel partner strategies. Marketing departments, meanwhile, rely on Crayon to monitor how the competition engages customers online. The startup says its service spots even subtle marketing-related developments, such as when a rival tests a new version of a promotional web page.

The startup argues that the information from its service can help organizations, particularly those operating in crowded markets, to boost their customer acquisition efforts. Crayon claims that its technology also frees up time for business users in the process. Collecting market intelligence is a time-consuming and, historically, largely manual process that the startup’s service promises to automate.

Crayon’s value proposition has helped it land numerous big-name customers in the tech industry, including Salesforce.com, Cisco Systems Inc., Adobe Inc. and Spotify Technology AB. The startup also has a presence in other major industries such as the finance sector, where it counts JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Visa Inc. among its customers. 

“It has always been critical that businesses respond with speed and urgency to competitive shifts because competitive intelligence informs everything from product launches to pricing strategies to marketing campaigns,” said Crayon co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Jonah Lopin. “But there’s traditionally never been a good way to pull that off.”

Crayon is part of a growing ecosystem of analytics startups focused on providing enterprises with data about the markets in which they compete. Its funding announcement comes a few months after sales intelligence startup Leadspace Inc. closed a $46 million funding round of its own. Meanwhile, SimilarWeb Ltd., which provides a platform that enables companies to measure how many users visit competitors’ websites and apps, is preparing for an initial public offering at a reported valuation of up to $2 billion.

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