Windfall Raises $9 Million to Build the World’s Most Complete and Accurate Source of Consumer Financial Data

Bullpen Capital leads the round with Bonfire Ventures, Industry Ventures, TenOneTen Ventures, ValueStream Ventures participating

Windfall Data Inc (“Windfall”), a company that determines the net worth of global households, announced that it raised $9 million in venture funding. The round was led by Bullpen Capital with Bonfire Ventures, Industry Ventures, TenOneTen Ventures, and ValueStream Ventures participating. Windfall will use the funding to continue building a global source of consumer financial data that aspires to be more accurate and versatile than anything else available.

Windfall currently offers financial insights on 80 million U.S. households. The company has grown 500 percent year-over-year and serves over 400 nonprofit and for-profit organizations. They include 1stdibs, Funding Circle, University of Colorado, and Bungalow.

Arup Banerjee, Cory Tucker, and Dan Stevens founded Windfall in 2016 to correct the pervasive inaccuracies in consumer financial data. As long-time developers of data products, the Windfall team knew that old-school data brokers rely on misleading sources like surveys and U.S. Census data, which are updated too infrequently. These sources also depend on zip codes, which frequently lead to false generalizations about households in areas with socioeconomic diversity.

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A 2017 Deloitte Insights study of a leading third-party data broker confirmed just how poor its consumer financial data has become. 71 percent of participants who reviewed their profiles from the broker reported that less than half of the information was accurate.

Windfall differentiates itself from legacy brokers by leveraging deterministic household-level data such as real estate transactions, court records, SEC filings, and other public-domain sources. Windfall also partners with data vendors like BizEquity to fill gaps in the public record. Once a week, Windfall reconstructs its entire database of household net worth using machine learning and proprietary data science techniques to ensure that clients have the most up-to-date and accurate profiles.

In addition, Windfall provides contextual data about recent moves, births, weddings, IPOs, and other life events. The quality and diversity of this financial data makes it use in sales, marketing, data science, donor relations, academic research, and many other fields.

“Having launched and sold successful data companies, I recognized that Windfall had turned an industry blindspot into a significant opportunity,” said Auren Hoffman, CEO of SafeGraph and Windfall’s first investor. “Windfall’s success with nonprofits and enterprises shows just how much unmet demand there is for a better financial data source.”

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Nonprofit clients use Windfall to understand their donors and to identify and engage high-potential philanthropists. Similarly, for-profit clients in financial services, luxury retail, hospitality, and travel use Windfall Data to identify and engage their ideal customers. Insights from Windfall help these companies share more relevant products and services with better timing and messaging.

Windfall Data works by integrating with platforms like Salesforce, Shopify, and LiveRamp. The company’s data engine enriches the donor, prospect, and customer records with net worth and more than 30 other attributes that help to segment audiences.

“We invested in Windfall Data because they are tackling a problem that almost no one has touched in 40 years,” said Paul Martino, General Partner at Bullpen Capital. “Other investors assume that anyone trying to challenge the kingpins of consumer financial data must be crazy. The difference is that the Windfall team has skills, experience, technology, and a strategy that should make the market leaders take notice.”

“Our goal is to build consumer datasets that are actionable and trustworthy,” said Arup Banerjee, CEO of Windfall Data. “We’ve found that conventional business intelligence and marketing datasets decay, leaving users with a wealth of pointless data. Windfall intends to be the first data company that keeps pace with a fast-changing world.”

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