Persado Raises $15M for Persuasive Marketing
Persado, a marketing and Web advertising software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider, today announced that the company closed on a round of Series A funding valued at $15 million. The funding round was led by Bain Capital Ventures.
The company's platform, which it terms “marketing persuasion technology,” aims to take the guesswork out of crafting marketing messages by automatically generating and selecting messages with the most impact. Those messages can then be delivered across digital channels like in-app messaging, mobile text, social media and email.
According to Persado, the self-learning and optimizing platform employs “structured maps of buying emotions and a massive database of marketing vocabulary” to generate marketing messages to increase campaign effectiveness. Persado's platform is typically used in conjunction with CRM, content and advertising solutions.
Persado CEO and founder Alex Vratskides explained in a statement, “Where others see sentences and phrases comprising an offer, we are unique in seeing multi-dimensional vector spaces that can be efficiently explored. With this funding round, we are excited to bring this innovation to a broader marketplace of digital marketing customers.”
Part of the company's plan to broaden its market opportunities is to open up a new headquarters in New York City. Persado currently counts Skype, Badoo and South American mobile carrier TIM Brazil among its customers.
According to Omer Shai, vice president of marketing at Wix.com, a website creation tools company, Persado's approach to digital marketing is having a profound effect on customer communications.
“Marketing persuasion technology has significantly impacted the results we achieve via messages to our users. Persado solves the difficult problem of generating the best-performing marketing messages specifically for our customers and our products,” Shai said.
Persado joins a growing list of marketing software specialists that have caught the attention of venture capitalists.
Earlier this week, Sailthru raised $19 million for its “smart data” platform, which leverages Big Data analytics for automated and personalized customer communications. And last week, Boston-based DataXu announced it had raised $27 million to advance its automated ad targeting and media spend optimization technology.
SumAll raised $6 million in November for its cloud-based data analytics platform for small businesses, with capabilities including a social marketing ROI measurement tool. Last summer, 33Across banked $13 million for its Big Data, predictive analytics and social marketing mashup.
Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.
Pedro Hernandez contributes to Enterprise Apps Today, and 11Press, the technology network. He was previously the managing editor of Internet.com, an IT-related website network. He has expertise in Smart Tech, CRM, and Mobile Tech, Helping Banks and Fintechs, Telcos and Automotive OEMs, and Healthcare and Identity Service Providers to Protect Mobile Apps.
