An $800,000 (£500,000) seed funding round for Futurelytics has been led by Index Ventures so that the business can expand into the UK and US.

The Czech firm provides businesses with what it describes as a ‘plug-and-play’ service that uses existing sources such as CRM systems and e-commerce platforms to recommend how turnover can be increased, customer retention grown and customers acquired.

Joining the round alongside Index Ventures, the firm behind investments in Funding Circle, Nasty Gal and Secret Escapes, is Credo Ventures, Kima Ventures and former CEO of Fizzback and business angel Rob Keve.

The seed round follows on from $65,000 of early-stage capital that Futurelytics secured from micro investment fund and mentoring program Seedcamp in 2012. It was the first time that a Czech business had received funding from Seedcamp.

The capital it has now garnered will be put towards product development as well as international expansion into the US and UK markets.

Daniel Hastik, CEO of Futurelytics, comments, ‘The notion that to be able to mine data, you need to be a big firm with an IT department to manage it, expensive software to crunch it and data scientists to analyse it, is false.

‘Most businesses already have customer data in various cloud services. We offer them a very simple way to analyse those data sets and immediately take actions that will directly impact their business. It’s that simple.’

More on Index Ventures investments:

• MyHeritage nets return capital from Index Ventures
• Imran Amed’s The Business of Fashion dressed for growth

Index Ventures partner Jan Hammer says that the firm believes prescriptive analytics is an ‘extremely powerful’ tool as it runs campaigns for companies.

‘Daniel and Mirek [Cerny, CTO] have assembled a very strong team in Ostrava and have shown that brilliant entrepreneurs really can come from anywhere,’ Hammer adds.

‘For the long time we’ve known the team, we’ve continued to be impressed by what they’ve achieved.’