Sales-lead generator Demandbase has rolled out a widget that discloses the company affiliation of web visitors and pulled down $8 million in fresh funding from a consortium that includes Adobe Systems.

Joining Adobe, whose Adobe AIR technology powers the widget, were Altos Ventures and Sigma Partners.

The free Demandbase Stream widget provides a desktop ticker that shows the company affiliation of visitors to a user’s website. Once marketers recognize interest on the part of a company, they can use Stream to look up and purchase appropriate business contacts at that company.

Chris Golec, founder and chief executive of San Francisco-based Demandbase, said the company is “unbundling” the sales-list industry, which typically requires users to buy thousands of names.

“We tried to emulate the experience that iTunes or Amazon offers,” he said. “With all our products, we will stick to self-service, pay-as-you-go, time to get started two minutes or less.”

A single contact typically costs $1.50, running to about $2 for a contact that includes an e-mail address, said Mr. Golec, who sold a previous company, Supplybase, to i2 Technologies in 2000 in a stock deal then valued at $380 million. Though some list brokers price their contacts at $1, he added that Demandbase has encountered little price resistance.

Incorrect or outdated information can hamstring marketers who use sales lists and Mr. Golec said Demandbase typically uses about 15 percent of a list, scrubbing the data, merging information from Experian, Zoominfo and other sources and remapping the industry and sub-industry segments. The process also includes validating the e-mail addresses of prospects and giving them the opportunity to remove information.

“There’s a lot of data hygiene,” he said of the company’s six million business contacts. “This is not a blast-type system. It’s meant to do very targeted—even one-to-one—communications.”

Demandbase is integrated into Salesforce.com through the App-Exchange program of the customer relationship management software provider.

“We liked Chris’ track record and the technology approach to lead quality, but what really excited us was Demandbase’s convergence of passive Web traffic into sales leads,” Bob Spinner, managing director at Sigma Partners and a new member of the Demandbase board of directors, said in a statement. “If you consider the billions of dollars that B2B marketers spend each year for what they call a ‘lead’, and compare that to the results coming out of Demandbase, this company has a great chance of becoming the next generation platform for lead acquisition.”