Feature
Evergage, a Somerville, Mass.–based SaaS personalization platform, has secured $10 million in Series C funding to double down on its customer experience.
The round — which brings Evergage's total venture funding to $31.5 million — was led by Arrowroot Capital, with participation from previous investors G20 Ventures and PJC. Arrowroot Capital and its founder Matthew Safaii also led Evergage’s $10 million Series B round back in 2016.
Launched in 2010, Evergage allows B2B and B2C marketers to deliver one-to-one personalization, based on behavioral analytics, a customer-data real-time personalization platform and machine learning. It considers itself a challenger to Adobe.
Evergage CEO and co-founder Karl Wirth said the 85-employee company will use this fresh cash injection to further its vision of helping customers, “increase conversions, improve engagement, grow loyalty and, ultimately, provide a better experience for their key audiences.”
This funding round follows the publication of Forrester’s report, "The Forrester Wave: Digital Intelligence Platforms, Q2 2017," which recognized Evergage as a strong performer.
More Funding News
Amplitude Raises $30 Million Series C
San Francisco-based Amplitude, an analytics company, announced it raised $30 million in Series C funding led by IVP. Existing investors Benchmark Capital and Battery Ventures also participated in this round, bringing total funding to date to $59 million.
Company officials said they'll use the money to further scale operations globally and build new solutions.
Amplitude, which has 100 employees, helps product teams use advanced analytics with behavioral queries to help them understand drivers of their core metric.
Somesh Dash, general partner at IVP who will join Amplitude’s Board as an observer, said IVP is investing in Amplitude because "we know they (sic) have the potential to transform critical business outcomes for product leaders. We see the same possibilities for a paradigm shift in product analytics as we saw with Adobe Omniture galvanizing marketing analytics and Salesforce catalyzing sales process and analytics.”
Parse.ly Nets $6.8M
New York City-based Parse.ly, a web analytics platform, has closed a $6.8 million Series B.
Existing investors Grotech Ventures and Blumberg Capital led the round with continued support from Felton Group, FundersClub, DreamIt and a number of other angels.
Parse.ly's client network includes 250 companies, 2,500 media websites and more than one billion monthly unique visitors, up 150 percent since this time last year.
"We're quickly seeing the convergence of brands and publishers: publishers focused on building a loyal digital audience, and brands focused on growing relationships directly with consumers," Sachin Kamdar, Parse.ly's CEO, said in a statement. "The key to navigating this shift is helping all parties understand attention through data at scale."
New Hires
R2i Hires Quinlan as CEO
Digital agency R2i has hired Jennifer Quinlan as its new CEO.
R2i's Board of Directors and private equity investor Baird Capital approved the hire. She succeeds Matt Goddard, co-founder, who worked closely with the board on the hire. R2i does Adobe and Sitecore implementations among other digital projects.
“The agency has reached an important milestone in its evolution and Jennifer’s 20-plus years of direct and digital marketing services, account management, operations and business segment leadership experience from her prior roles align with the direction R2i is poised to go,” Richard Neff, chairman of the R2i Board, said in a statement.
Quinlan last served as North American digital practice leader for IBM Global Business Services Distribution Sector. She led a team of digital consultants and practitioners serving consumer products, retail, travel, transportation and life sciences industries as well as the Digital Commerce practice for North America.
Prior to IBM, she was senior vice president at Merkle, a premier digital performance management agency.
“The agency’s foundation in implementing marketing technology to enable digital experiences using content and creative for improved customer outcomes is critical for the next evolution of our growth as a full-service digital agency," Quinlan said.
Episerver Hires Sue Bergamo for CIO, CISO Roles
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Episerver, a Stockholm-based digital experience provider, announced it hired Microsoft veteran Sue Bergamo as the company's chief information officer (CIO) and chief information security officer (CISO).
At Microsoft, Bergamo worked with a worldwide team of enterprise architects and account managers to develop a range of applications, products and solutions.
At prior companies Cigna, CVS Pharmacy, Liberty Mutual and Staples, she handled strategic planning, product management, IT operations and infrastructure, cybersecurity, data management, application development and process redesign.
Accenture Acquires Marketing Agency Wire Stone
Dublin-based Accenture has acquired Wire Stone, a creative marketing agency. Company officials said the acquisition strengthens the ability of Accenture Interactive to deliver data-driven creative and design end-to-end digital customer experiences.
Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
Wire Stone creates integrated campaigns and immersive experiences. Its services span brand positioning, customer research and data-driven insights, marketing strategy, execution and promotions, creative design and technology enablement for digital experience.
Wire Stone has nearly 200 employees in the US. It marks the 15th acquisition Accenture Interactive has made in the last five years.
Earlier this month, Accenture acquired Search Technologies, a Herndon, Va.-based technology services firm specializing in the design, implementation and management of big data and search analytics.
In July, Accenture Interactive acquired Clearhead, a digital optimization company, and in May acquired e-commerce solution provider Media Hive (US).
NICE Extends AI Solutions
Hoboken, NJ-based NICE has announced that it is extending its Robotic Automation solution to include an open platform integration with cognitive automation technologies, including chat-, voice- and IVR-bots.
The aim is to help companies address a higher level of process automation complexity and support automation scenarios. A recent Forrester Research report found the robotic process automation (RPA) market would grow to $2.9 billion by 2021 from a base of $250 million in 2016.
NICE officials said the new cognitive automation capabilities will make traditional process automation smarter. Robots will perform cognitive decisioning as part of the automation flow using natural language processing, text analytics, optical character recognition and machine learning services.
It will be able to process unstructured data from multiple sources (e.g. emails, scanned documents, etc.).
"The innovative NICE framework opens up a new set of automation opportunities based on the smartest cognitive technologies on the market today, both from our own portfolio as well as from third-party vendors," said Miki Migdal, president of the NICE Enterprise Product Group.
Correspondent Kaya Ismail covered the Evergage item in this report.
