TreeCrunch Crunches Data, Gives it Meaning

Founded in October 2011, TreeCrunch is a Hong Kong-based data analytics company. It claims to be able to take virtually any unstructured or loosely connected data, analyze and visualize it in close to real-time. The startup also provides key themes and trends based on the data analyzed.

The idea is simple and straightforward. But not many data analytics companies can claim to be able to turn data into meaningful and actionable steps. Making data pretty yes; but actionable crunched data is the keyword here. You can check out TreeCrunch’s sample work here and here. Zane Moi, the co-founder of TreeCrunch, has long seen a missing gap (going back to his time at previous corporations) between data visualization and actionable steps. He explained to us how the idea started:

At RIM, I was spending US$30-40k per quarter for sentiment monitoring services, which told me that a certain percentage of people kind of liked the BlackBerry brand, a certain percentage of people didn’t like it, and this percentage of people were bigger or smaller than the percentage from other brands. I never received, though, any real insight as to why people liked or didn’t like the brand.

I thought, this isn’t such a difficult of technology-oriented problem to solve, and if other firms are paying US$30-40k per quarter for analysis that isn’t all that useful, I think I could sell something as an alternative to it at a similar price; something that is useful.

So the idea gave birth to a startup, and the founding team was completed when Patrick Kosiol and Boris Boege came on board as co-founders. Both Patrick and Boris are experienced entrepreneurs. TreeCrunch was self-funded with the three co-founders pooling $200,000 from their own pockets. Subsequently, the startup went on to receive $12,000 from Hong Kong’s Cyberport Creative Microfund and in May and concluded a small funding round of about $80,000 from investors from Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, the UK, and the US.

“For us, we’re still traveling down the familiar path of building startups by finding product market fit,” said Zane.