Somerville, Mass.-based Evergage, a personalization platform, raised another $10 million in venture capital. The Series B round, led by Arrowroot Capital, boosts total funding to more than $21 million.
“Personalization is the word on every marketer’s lips for 2016, and Evergage stands above in our eyes,” Matthew Safaii, managing partner at Arrowroot Capital and new Evergage board member, said in a statement.
He said the company's end-to-end personalization platform empowers marketers "to harness the power of machine learning, analytics and big data — in real time — to effortlessly provide unobtrusive and meaningful interactions with customers across channel.”
Evergage officials claim both average contract value and year-over-year revenue more than doubled in the past year. It also enhanced in-depth testing functionality, mobile app support, machine learning-driven recommendations, account-based marketing and attribution reporting capabilities.
ToutApp Updates
Sales-enablement platform provider ToutApp released an addition to the platform to simplify and automate the sales workflow.
Called Sales Campaigns, it's designed to let sales people break down sales playbooks and build easy-to-execute, shareable workflows around them. (A sales playbook is a collection of tactics or methods that describes the roles and responsibilities of sales teams as well as laying out clear objectives and metrics for measurement.)
Sales Campaigns is intended to make its easier and faster to close sales while monitoring and evaluating the key stages in the sales process for effectiveness.
Tawheed Kader, CEO and founder of San Francisco-based ToutApp, said sales reps are challenged to manage intricate workflows that span email, phone calls and social. This app allows them to automate "increasingly complex outreach strategies, focusing only on the steps that allow them to move a deal forward, regardless of the potential buyer’s position in the funnel.”
Once built, Sales Campaigns prompts reps about upcoming events, allowing them to activate steps manually, directly from ToutApp (phone calls, for instance), while completely automating others. It also comes with Tracking and Evaluation, which measures and evaluates the effectiveness of each individual step in the process as well as Teamwide Sharing, which enables reps share campaigns across their entire teams.
Keeping Up With Your Contacts
How useful is your Google Contacts address book?
Not so much, according to Evercontact, a company that automatically extracts, updates and stores email addresses from your inbox.
Of course — not surprisingly, given Evercontact's vested interest in technology to keep your contacts current — that changes if your contacts list is regularly updated.
Using data extracted from 2 billion email messages, Evercontact concluded:
- An average professional Google Contacts address book contains 1,379 contacts
- Of those contacts 40 percent have only have basic information
- 44 percent of a typical Google address book changes (created or updated) every three months
- 33 percent are missing an email address
- 46 percent are missing a phone number
Evercontact is the flagship product of Kwaga, a Paris-based cloud service provider launched in 2009. Last April it received a $1 million investment from insurance giant AXA.
PlaceIQ Boosts Platform
Investors gave New York City location data analysis provider PlaceIQ $25 million Series D funding. The company plans to use the money to develop its location-based audience platform, which provides consumer analytics and media targeting. It will also invest in Place Visit Rate foot traffic measurement technology that provides granular data on consumer visitation across the purchase journey.
“PlaceIQ has pioneered a new way of understanding consumer behavior,“ Duncan McCall, CEO and co-founder of PlaceIQ, said in a statement. “We’ve spent the past five years building the go-to location technology that brands have adopted to unlock new insights when marketing to consumers across all key industries.”
George Bell, a technology pioneer with more than 25 years of experience managing high-growth companies, joins PlaceIQ’s Board of Directors as chairman.
PlaceIQ has also been granted a new patent, which recognizes technology advancements that have allowed the company to create a unified view of consumer behavior, using accurate connections between location data, traditional data sets and third-party data sets.
Cash for Content Marketing
Content marketing provider ClearVoice closed on a $1.1 million round of funding. Peak Ventures, Desert Angles, PC Ventures and two undisclosed angel investors led the round.
Phoenix, Ariz.-based ClearVoice offers content tools, workflow and marketplace to provide the support to execute content marketing campaigns.
ClearVoice also raised $250,000 through the Arizona Commerce Authority's AZ Innovation Challenge. Before December, ClearVoice operated without any outside funding. The company is on pace to exceed $5 million in revenue in its first year, officials said.
“We hit the product, revenue and delivery milestones we set out to achieve,” ClearVoice co-founder Jay Swansson said in a statement. “We came to a point where the business proved itself on paper and in practice, and we knew that seeking investment to accelerate growth made sense.”
Money Swings Boomerang’s Way
Mountain View, Calif. retail analytics provider Boomerang Commerce announced a Series B funding round of $12 million led by Shasta Ventures. Existing backers Madrona Venture Group and Trinity Ventures also participated.
Boomerang officials said they’ll invest the funds in their technology suite to include optimization and price intelligence with actionable recommendations and assortment optimization in near real time.
“Boomerang Commerce is a technology partner to modern retailers. We help them hone in on core competencies and win the markets they see as critical to their success, while also aiding them in decisions on where to scale up and scale down,” Boomerang CEO Guru Hariharan said in a statement. “Our goal is to give our customers an unfair advantage that leads them to victory in the modern retail world.”
Cambridge Semantics Acquires SPARQL City
Boston-based Cambridge Semantics, which provides analytic and data management solutions driven by semantic web technology, acquired SPARQL City and hired former CEO and founder Barry Zane and other executives from the firm.
This acquisition enables Cambridge Semantics to expand its Anzo Smart Data Platform to offer big data scale and value for enterprise-wide data lake and analytic initiatives.
Chuck Pieper, CEO of Cambridge Semantics, said in a statement that “no one else in the market can provide a similar end-to-end, semantic- and graph-based solution providing for data integration, data management and advanced analytics at the scale, context and speed that meets the needs of enterprises. The SPARQL City in-memory graph query engine allows users to conduct exploratory analytics at big data scale interactively.”
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What's in a WordStream?
WordStream, a Boston-based provider of online advertising software and services, announced this week a new standalone product. Company officials claim it makes Facebook advertising “more effective, more cost-efficient, and less complicated for businesses of all types and sizes.”
WordStream’s new social software is called WordStream Social Ads. Features include:
- Audience targeting: Finding and reach possible prospects with “lookalike” audiences and Facebook re-marketing
- 20-minute work week alerts: Customized recommendations for social campaign optimizations
- Landing pages, leads: Create mobile-friendly landing pages, track conversions
- Social ads reporting: Includes at-a-glance Facebook Ads campaign dashboard
NYC Collaboration
NYI, an enterprise grade data center and managed IT solutions provider enabling customers to build customized infrastructure, has partnered with the Alliance for Downtown New York’s Lower Manhattan HQ, a collaboration space for Lower Manhattan’s creatives and creators. The partnership enables NYI to connect and collaborate with more than 800 tech firms and startups, major brands, agencies and media companies.
MediaMath’s New Biz Unit
MediaMath, one of the companies included in Gartner’s Digital Marketing Hubs Magic Quadrant this month, launched a new business unit offering proprietary data to customers. The unit, called Helix, will commercialize the large scale data sets MediaMath’s partners and its clients provide, build predictive audiences and actionable insights, and evolve how programmatic buyers utilize data.
“Programmatic’s success is built on the back of data — it is the fuel and exhaust of our industry,” Jacob Ross, president of Helix, said in a statement. “Even after shifting significant budget, and making investments in and around programmatic strategies, advertisers still struggle with the limited scale of their own customer data and unreliability of third-party data. Helix is MediaMath’s answer to this problem: pooling high quality data that truly helps drive business outcomes.”
Investment in Social Insights
Atlanta word-of-mouth marketing company Insightpool closed $3 million in debt financing led by Silicon Valley Bank and insider investors.
The Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company, which helps brands generate insights from social media data for marketing and advertising campaigns, will use the funding to support product development and hiring at its offices in Atlanta, New York and San Francisco.
The company’s technology claims to provide real-time insights from social data and create actionable strategies. Insightpool’s big data platform applies filtering and analytics technology to create micro-clusters of targets based on granular behavioral and demographic characteristics.
New Look for Campaign Monitor
San Francisco-based Campaign Monitor, an email marketing provider, announced an All-New Campaign Monitor.
Officials said it delivers a drag-and-drop email design experience that helps marketers create “beautiful, branded, highly personalized campaigns.”
“We’ve taken a big step in empowering our customers to bring their grand email marketing visions to life in a simple, elegant, do-it-yourself manner,” Kraig Swensrud, CMO of Campaign Monitor, said in a statement.
The platform includes updated background images, personalized content, customization and control and flexible templates.
Super Day for Wix.com
The web development industry will have an appearance in this year’s Super Bowl. Tel Aviv web development platform Wix.com this week shared details about the creative direction of its second Super Bowl spot that will air during the CBS broadcast on Feb. 7.
Developed in collaboration with DreamWorks Animation, Wix’s #StartStunning campaign will feature characters from the upcoming movie Kung Fu Panda 3 as they seek to “boost recognition for Mr. Ping’s Noodles.”
“They embark on a series of ‘out of the box’ marketing activities but quickly realize that the key to success is to simply #StartStunning with a Wix website,” Wix officials reported.
“The Super Bowl is a huge stage, and all brands play offense to score big and win viewers’ attention. Collaborating with a creative leader like DreamWorks Animation enabled us to develop a fun and effective campaign that will give us an edge come Super Bowl Sunday,” Wix CMO Omer Shai said in a statement.
Wix officials said 76 million users worldwide use Wix’s website building and hosting platform.
Title image by Alice Hampson
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