Estimize Announces $1.2 Million Series A from Contour Ventures and Longworth Ventures

Estimize, the first open platform for financial estimates, has announced that it has closed its Series A financing, raising about $1.2 million from Bob Green at Contour Ventures and Jim Savage at Longworth Ventures. Green was previously the lead investor at Multex, a financial estimates company that was acquired by Thomson Reuters. He also served on Multex's board. Savage is a lead investor in uTest, a crowdsourcing company designed to address software bugs. Green and Savage are not the only investors to join this round; several angels, including members of the Estimize community, are also on board. In addition to the investment, Estimize revealed that the site has more than 1,300 community members who currently contribute estimates. Since the company's debut in December 2011, more than 11,000 estimates have been made. More than 6,000 of those estimates came from this quarter alone, which saw coverage of more than 230 stocks with at least four estimates each earnings release. When Estimize has four or more estimates for a release, the consensus is more accurate on 67 percent of those releases. That accuracy rises to more than 77 percent when Estimize has 20 or more estimates for a release. "Raising our Series A financing is just one more step in the process that we laid out when we started building this company and this product, trying to disrupt something significant in the financial world," Leigh Drogen, co-founder and CEO of Estimize, wrote in a blog post this morning. "There is such a huge opportunity in building the first open financial estimates platform, from a business standpoint as well as how many broken institutions we can disrupt. This financing helps to provide the tools and talent to implement that vision." Estimize said that its community members include senior execs from all of the top 20 hedge funds in the United States. In addition, several hedge funds with assets greater than $10 billion have acquired commercial licenses from Estimize to utilize its data. The company recently added a lead designer the team, which now has five people. Estimize is also looking for a senior Ruby developer. Finally, Estimize said that it is working on several high-level partnerships with large financial data companies. No other details were provided. Follow me @LouisBedigianBZ