Estimize, a US start-up that pools members' forecasts for earnings results at listed companies, has raised $1.2 million in funding and launched a crowdsourced mergers and acquisitions predictions platform.
Current investors Bob Greene from Contour Venture Partners and Jim Savage from Longworth Venture Partners joined the round along with several individuals and a syndicate of angels put together by ValueStream Labs.
Since launching in late 2011, Estimize has signed up more than 4000 contributing analysts and 25,000 registered users to its earnings forecasts platform.
The firm claims that the consensus reached by its community is more accurate than the Wall Street estimate data set of record 65% of the time, and is also more representative of the true expectation of the market.
In a blog post, CEO Leigh Drogen claims that he is "constantly" being approached by venture funds offering investment of up to $6 million but that the amount raised in the new round is "right for us at this stage".
The new money will be used to help Estimize scale out into other data sets, beginning with the public launch of Mergerize, where it will crowdsource expectations for mergers and acquisitions.
The platform has launched with the whole list of startup and private companies found on Crunchbase, as well as about 4,800 publicly traded US listed equities.
Drogan says that M&A will act as a useful entrant into the world of corporate actions, with areas like IPO expectations, spin offs and FDA approvals all on the agenda in the longer run.
"I can see a day in the not too distant future where corporate strategy executives come to Mergerize to see which companies the crowd believes they should buy and at what price the crowd believes they should buy them at," he predicts.