Business-matching platform combines predictive analytics and artificial intelligence capabilities to help companies source partnership and growth opportunities globally

Powerlinx, a global innovator in the partner economy, today announced that it has completed a $7 million USD Series A funding. The financing round was led by its founders and a global group of strategic investors including France-based business information giant Altares D&B. Powerlinx formally came out of beta in March 2016, with the launch of its Platform Subscription Services.

Powerlinx is a unique business growth platform that matches companies to strategic partnership and collaboration opportunities. It breaks apart the traditionally time-consuming and expensive process of strategic partnering, previously exclusive only to industry giants with access to elite banks and consulting firms, and provides strategic growth insight to every single company, business owner and entrepreneur on Main Street.

The platform is powered by its proprietary recommendation engine, the PowerScoreTM, which predicts the likelihood of each member’s business successfully partnering with a potential target selected from the Powerlinx database of 52 million companies. The engine draws on a deep inventory of quantitative and qualitative internal data that contributes to a successful partnership, including mutual objectives, business characteristics and past performance with partnerships. Recommendations generated from the engine feed into the Partner GraphTM, the first graph analysis that maps the compatibility of meaningful partner relationships between companies.

“The partnership arena is often limited to big business due to expensive consulting services,” said Doron Cohen, Powerlinx co-founder and chairman of Dun & Bradstreet Israel. “Powerlinx now brings a business-matching partnership platform, backed by big data capabilities, to any company, regardless of sector or size, across the world. Never before has this industry been so ripe for disruption.”

The platform is now approaching 50,000 member companies from more than 165 countries. Each of them is specifically seeking other companies they can partner with to grow their businesses. Opportunities include integrated supply chain agreements, joint venture partnerships to enter new markets, mergers and acquisitions, technology agreements and capital projects. To date, Powerlinx users have listed over $30 billion USD worth of opportunities.

The successful completion of its Series A will allow Powerlinx to further expand its global footprint and scale up member acquisition activities. The funding round was led by well-established players in the business information and analytics industry. The founders are experienced executives that have led some of the world’s most influential big data companies with unique expertise in turning business information into innovative insights.

Powerlinx is answering the call for a better way to enable small and medium sized businesses to partner smarter. According to the 2014 CMO Council/Business Performance Innovation (BPI) Network study, 85% of companies think that finding the right strategic partner is essential to grow, 57% are spending $100,000 on average each year on this search, and 74% would like to have an automated solution to help them to find and connect to some potential strategic partners.