Closely

Closely is an all-in-one platform designed for B2B sales teams, marketers, and recruiters that automates outreach on LinkedIn and through email. The service provides a B2B contact database and tools to enrich this data with verified email addresses and phone numbers, aiming to streamline lead generation and improve engagement. Its primary customers are sales professionals, agencies, and founders looking to scale their prospecting efforts by automating tasks like sending connection requests and personalized follow-up messages. Closely utilizes AI to personalize messages based on a user's profile data, which can increase response rates. The platform's focus on mimicking human behavior is intended to keep users' LinkedIn accounts safe from restrictions. The service's activities of collecting and utilizing professional contact information, including names, job titles, company details, and email addresses, raise privacy considerations. If this data is inaccurate or used for deceptive purposes, it could lead to professional reputational damage or targeted phishing and scam attempts. Bad actors could potentially misuse this aggregated professional data to craft sophisticated social engineering attacks against individuals and their employers. To mitigate these risks, professionals should be cautious about the information they share publicly on platforms like LinkedIn. Individuals can also exercise their data rights under regulations like GDPR and CCPA to request access to or deletion of their personal information from such databases.