58. Aner Ravon applies AI to market research

Our guest today is Aner Ravon, Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer at Zirra, a technology company focused on market analysis, using big data and artificial intelligence.

Aner and his co-founder recognized a real pain point for investors and anyone else doing research on smaller companies: it is very time intensive to search the universe of sources and pull together a basic set of facts.

They thought, wouldn’t it be nice if we could use artificial intelligence to scan public sources and pull together the basic information, so that analysts can spend their time on processing the information and synthesis. And that is just what they built.

Zirra’s main product is a company snapshot that is built by a combination of artificial intelligence and a human editor who provides quality control.

The snapshots are created on demand and take about 24 hours or less to deliver.

I’ve tried out the service myself and I’ve been very satisfied. 

The report you receive looks like it was created by a human.  It draws on dozens of potential sources, such as LinkedIn for number of employees, Glassdoor for employee reviews, websites of the company and its competitors.  All the sources the report relies on are listed with live links.

The price of this company snapshot depends on how many you are going to purchase. If you are buying only a handful, the price starts at $200. If you are industrial scale, the price can get down to $100 each.

The ideal target to research using Zirra has revenue in the $5 to $100 million range.  For smaller companies, there probably isn’t much public on the web for Zirra to scrape.  And for larger companies you can probably find some Wikipedia article or analyst coverage to get you up to speed.

The ideal time to use Zirra is right at the beginning of a project.  If you’ve already been looking at a company for a couple of weeks, you will probably already know most of what Zirra will tell you. The biggest value is using Zirra to quickly get up to speed so starting on Day 2 of your project you’re prepared to ask smarter questions as you pursue your research.

You can get started with Zirra by visiting www.zirra.com, click on the Pricing page and submit an inquiry. Aner himself will read your request and make sure you are taken care of.