There are numerous vendors tackling the challenges of data aggregation in the enterprise, but the majority focus only on the private records that companies keep behind the firewall and in their equally closely-guarded cloud deployments. Import.io Inc., by contrast, is working to simplify the collection of the publicly available information on the open web, an effort that has attracted a newly announced $13 million investment from five international investors.

Three, including Imperial Innovations Ltd., the firm that led the funding round, are based out of the U.K., which is where the startup was originally founded back in June of 2012. Its namesake service launched the following September with a straightforward visual interface for scraping data from sites that don’t provide a direct means of doing so. The aggregated results are available through a centralized programming interface that Import.io’s customers are putting to use in a wide variety of applications.

AudioLock Ltd, which helps record labels combat piracy, employs the service to scan the web for unlicensed music, while Plot.ly Inc. allows users of its popular online data visualization tool to incorporate scraped information into their charts. The perhaps the most notable use case for Import.io is competitive intelligence mining, a practice that has gained a considerable amount of steam over recent years with the growing reliance on data in decision making. Retailers in particular are increasingly monitoring their rivals’ e-commerce sites for inventory and pricing changes to stay on top of the market.

Import.io will spend the new $13 million in funding on augmenting its service to better support such advanced applications. The first item on the development roadmap is adding integrations with popular analytics solutions to help organizations take advantage of data collected through its service more easily. The startup will need every feature and convenience it can muster in order to take on the competition, which includes not only a plethora of rivaling web scraping providers but also companies like Distil Networks Inc. that sell software for blocking competitive intelligence mining.

Image via Geralt