LeadSift

LeadSift is a Canadian B2B sales and marketing intelligence company based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Its platform applies artificial intelligence and data mining to millions of real-time public web documents in order to surface accounts that are in-market for technology purchases and identify which individuals within those accounts to contact. Results are delivered to customers as a daily digest of qualified leads intended for outreach, sales follow-up and account-based marketing campaigns.

The product began as a social lead generation tool that mined social media data, primarily Twitter, to detect consumers and businesses expressing purchase intent, and later developed into a third-party, cookieless intent data service operating at both the account and contact level. Customers can configure custom triggers based on keywords, job postings and competitor names. Reported platform scale includes roughly 80 million intent signals captured per week across a database spanning 20 million companies and 30 million contacts. The software is cloud-based, supports English, has no dedicated mobile app, offers email support, and integrates with CRM systems and tools such as Reddit and Slack; a third-party software directory notes it does not expose an open API.

Since December 2021 LeadSift has been part of IDG Communications (later Foundry), where it sits alongside the KickFire visitor identification service and the Triblio account-based marketing platform. KickFire identifies in-market buyers on a customer's own website while LeadSift determines which companies are in-market based on activity across the public web and B2B media, making the two services complementary within IDG's MarTech stack.

Founding story

Co-founder and CEO Tapajyoti (Tukan) Das was born in India, moved from Calcutta to Halifax in 2002, and studied at Dalhousie University, where he was completing a master's degree in computer science as the company was getting off the ground. While working as a research engineer at a small search engine company he became interested in data mining and information extraction; in 2009 he and two friends experimented with the Twitter API and built a real-time search engine on Twitter data. Concluding that the search engine solved no real pain point but that social data contained commercially useful consumer insight, the group developed the idea for LeadSift. The company was incorporated in Halifax in April by Das and three other international students: Sreejata Chatterjee, a childhood friend from Calcutta, Hatem Nassrat from Egypt, and Daniel Allen from the Bahamas.

Business model

LeadSift sells subscription access to its intent data platform to B2B companies, delivering qualified in-market leads as a recurring data feed rather than as one-off reports. Data can be consumed in the platform or pushed into customers' CRM and marketing systems. Following the IDG acquisition, LeadSift's third-party intent data is being combined with IDG's first-party audience data and its Triblio activation platform.

Subscription pricing. Account-level intent was reported to start at $12,000 per year, and LeadSift 360, a contact-level intent service, at $30,000 per year. A software directory separately lists tiered plans of $19, $49 and $139 per month alongside a free tier and custom enterprise pricing. In its early years the company also earned revenue through a 50-50 revenue sharing agreement with Salesforce.

Traction

By the time of the 2021 acquisition LeadSift had a 15-person team in Halifax. Reported data scale included approximately 80 million intent signals captured weekly, 20 million companies and 30 million contacts. In its first year the company launched a trial version targeting up to 20 companies, won the Ad:Tech New York data analytics challenge and MentorCamp in Halifax, and secured an invitation to work with General Electric. The acquisition was described by the CEO as a positive outcome for shareholders and employees.

Latest developments

In December 2021, IDG Communications acquired LeadSift for undisclosed terms; the company was to continue operating independently for a period while its data was integrated into IDG's marketing solutions, with longer-term integration into IDG's marketing platform planned. In the same month LeadSift launched LeadSift 360, a contact-level intent service supporting keyword and research-based intent signals gathered from more than five data sources, priced from $30,000 per year. A software directory profile updated in January 2026 describes the platform as part of the IDG Communications (Foundry) ecosystem.