B2B digital behavior intelligence company ForMotiv raised a $6M seed round, with hiring to come

Formerly Center City-based ForMotiv, maker of a machine learning platform that promises to help companies in financial services and insurance spaces identify risky behavior, raised $6 million in a seed round. The funding is intended to help double the company’s workforce.

The digital behavior intelligence company is in its sixth year, and had been running off of a small bit of fundraising from back in 2018 and a $1 million bridge round late last year, Head of Product Mike Mayock told Technical.ly.

“The methodology was, ‘How long can we make that last?'” Mayock said. “And we made it last for a long time.”

Now, this seed round, led by Vestigo Ventures with participation from existing investor DreamIt Ventures, Plug and Play Ventures and a few others, will help the company bring in some key hires to boost its growth. Those will mainly be in data science and sales roles, Mayock said, and in 2022, the company will be doubling its 20-person team.

It will also go toward product development and further investing in the space where ForMotiv has been doubling down in the last year or so — the property, casualty and life insurance clients that its “digital body language” tech services.

Using information from customer’s digital behavior while interacting with online forms (such as time to complete applications, key strokes, repeated changes to responses and other red flags), ForMotiv can identify potentially risky client profiles and recommends additional steps to verify the information. The number of digital applications the company analyzed jumped from 100,000 to 100 million in 2020, and it signed several large clients like Exton’s iPipeline.

While the company is operating remotely, Mayock said the cofounders are committed to seeking Philly talent in the future, and he envisions getting a regional office some time soon.

For startup founders, it can be hard to know that right now is the right time to fundraise. Mayock said he and cofounder Bill Conners leaned on what they learned in their time at Relay Network as product managers. It was when they started to see their customers really buying into the tech, embedding it in their applications and gaining the customer return on investment that they decided to go for the fundraise.

“After all that, we started to change the methodology of ‘go slow to go fast’ to moving fast and building the team,” he said. “We had tangible customer ROI. The years of hoping we were going to meet customer market fit are here.”