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Marketing personalisation specialist Blueshift has secured an $8 million Series A round of venture financing that will enable it to accelerate the development of its marketing automation solutions.
As well as driving sales and marketing the investment will also be used to allow Blueshift to build out its proprietary Interaction Graph platform.
The platform powers Blueshift’s Segment-of-One marketing automation solutions. The Interaction Graph stores each user’s stream of interactions with products or contents and is constantly enhanced with additional attributes such as affinity scores, email and push notification, engagement data and more.
The company claims that its solutions can allow marketers to individually tailor their messages to customers based on shoppers’ interests, purchase patterns and browsing behaviour which it clams can lead to between a three and ten times increase in engagement rates.
The financing has been led by venture capital firm Storm Ventures who focus on SaaS, mobile and cloud enterprise startups and Nexus Venture Partners who work across the enterprise technology, internet, media, consumer and business services sectors and are already an existing investment partner in the business.
The investment sees Anshu Sharma of Storm and previously at Salesforce.com joining Blueshift’s board of directors to help guide the company’s future growth.
“Storm Ventures has previously backed many of the leading companies in marketing technology and SaaS, and we are especially thrilled with the confidence they have placed in us as we enter our next phase of growth,” said Vijay Chittoor, co-founder and CEO of Blueshift.
Sharma said he had been impressed by the capabilities of Blueshift’s technology. “At Salesforce, I saw first hand the challenges enterprise customers experienced in delivering personalised, relevant messages to consumers who are increasingly tuning out,” he said. “Blueshift has built a unique segment of one marketing platform by leveraging the very latest innovations in big data and machine learning—built by a team of seasoned marketing practitioners. We think this is the future of all marketing automation.”
After segmenting customers Blueshift clients can then choose a variety of merchandising techniques to encourage greater response such as collaborative filtering, affinity based content or retargeting.
