CircleBack, a new contact management system for businesses and individuals based in Vienna, Va., launches its new app today with a party at 1776. According to company founder Manoj Ramnani, CircleBack has been developing its solution to "out of date and duplicate contacts in address books" since mid-2012.
CircleBack imports data from physical business cards and turns them into digital contacts, automatically recognizing duplicates and suggesting updates. In addition to integrating with email and social media accounts, the app can, Ramnani says, "extract information from a person's signature from an email."
Ramnani says that CircleBack is different because CircleBack uses automatic optical character recognition (OCR) to read business cards. Competitors like FullCircle and LinkedIn's now-shuttered CardMunch
pay people to manually transcribe contact information on cards. "Our technology can scale."
CircleBack's acquisition of ScanBizCards, a top-10 business app in the App Store, makes the OCR possible and has brought the new company "4.5 million users already," Ramnani says. "We're getting thousands of new users every day."
The company is currently operating with a freemium model. Business users pay to sync CircleBack with a CRM system like Salesforce. The price can run from $100 per salesperson up to $250,000 per year, depending on company size, says Ramnani. "We've got ten of the Fortune 500 companies."
Right now, CircleBack is only available on iOS. An Android version is slated for Q2 of this year, as is a growth capital raise—"probably in the next 60 days," Ramnani says.
Oh, and CircleBack is hiring. The team of 50 wants to add
22 positions to the engineering, sales and marketing teams.