Santa Barbara-based HG Data has raised $2 million in venture capital, bringing its total raised to date to $5.5 million.

HG Data uses a proprietary algorithm to sift through massive amounts of messy online data to create a database of which software and hardware products are in use at about 1 million U.S companies. Fortune 500 technology companies buy the data and use it to boost their sales and marketing efforts.

HG Data has gone from tracking the technology at 600,000 U.S. businesses to about 1 million businesses. It tracks 50,000 Canadian companies and has turned its focus to Asia. HG Data is tracking firms in 14 Asian countries and hopes to follow 100,00 firms there. All told, the company aims to track technology deployments in 50 countries.

“We’ve been starting to do a lot of translation work so we can start working with unstructured data objects in other languages,” CEO Craig Harris told the Business Times in an interview. “We’re doing lots of translation from Cantonese and Mandarin. We’re running our algorithm in eight different languages.”

HG Data also plans to use the new funding to ramp up its sales efforts. It has signed a deal with Dun & Bradstreet, one of the biggest business-to-business information firms in the nation, to distribute its data to the company’s customers.

“We’re one of their first data partners,” Harris said. “It scales our reach without having to onboard hundreds of salespeople ourselves.”
The funding round was the third tranche of HG Data’s Series A round. It was led by Santa Barbara-based Rincon Ventures. Rincon general partner and startup guru John Greathouse will join HG Data’s board. The funding round also included existing investor Epic Ventures and several existing angels, including Kevin O’Connor, founder of DoubleClick and current CEO of Summerland-based FindTheBest.

In a press release, Greathouse said Rincon was impressed with HG Data’s “easy-to-use and difficult-to-copy” service.

“When the biggest players in your market begin aggressively courting you as a potential partner, you know you have arrived. We are honored to have a seat on the HG Data rocket ship,” Greathouse said in the news release.