Marketing automation platform Blueshift raises $8M in Series A funding

Blueshift, provider of ‘Segment-of-one marketing automation’ solutions for consumer marketing companies, today announced that it has raised $8 million Series A round of venture financing led by Storm Ventures. Existing investor Nexus Venture Partners(NVP) also participated in the round. In November 2014, Blueshift had raised a $2.6 million seed round led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Nexus Venture Partners. The company was founded by Manyam Mallela, Vijay Chittoor, Mehul Shah- who have backgrounds at successful companies such as Kosmix (now WalmartLabs) and Mertado (now Groupon Goods).

With multiple communication channels such as text messages, email, push notifications and an ever growing customer base, marketing teams at startups and enterprises need to provide relevant information to consumers, without overwhelming them. Blueshift aims to solve this pain point by allowing marketers to individually tailor their messages to their customers based on shoppers’ interests, purchase patterns and browsing behavior.

To achieve this, the San Francisco based company utilizes real-time segmentation and dynamic-content personalization across different channels. Blueshift claims to be driving a 3-10X increase in engagement rates. The company is applying innovations in artificial intelligence to make digital marketing smarter, better and more relevant. In fact, according to the company's spokesperson, Blueshift is delivering ‘Rocket Science as a Service (RSaaS)’ to consumer marketers by combining big data and machine learning .

With the multi-channel capabilities of Blueshift, customers can scale to multiple messaging channels, including email, mobile push notifications, SMS and display--including Facebook retargeting and Facebook custom audiences--synchronizing messaging across all these channels. Blueshift enables marketers to segment customers based on behavior, predictive scores, affinity, catalog attributes, lifecycle, demographics, response to messages and traffic sources. 

Future plans and YourStory take

Blueshift will use the capital to accelerate sales and marketing and to continue building out its proprietary ‘Interaction Graph’ platform. As a part of the deal, Anshu Sharma of Storm Ventures has joined the Blueshift board of directors, bringing to the company his experience in SaaS from his executive leadership role at Salesforce.com.Vijay, co-founder and CEO of Blueshift said,

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.

According to the report, 'State of the marketing technology industry(2014)' by Mintigo, the industries with the highest rates of adoption for marketing automation are software and internet, telecommunications, computer and electronics, health and pharmaceuticals, business services.

With the internet population in both developing and developed nations growing at an exponential rate, online marketers will have their hands full. The larger scale brings a larger audience to track but simultaneously the complexities involved in collecting feedback and responding to customers increases.

Potential customers will have different social mediums as their preferred choice of engagement and companies will need to be nimble enough to respond across multiple platforms. Blueshift has an experienced team that has developed their platform and services around big data and machine learning. It will be interesting to see how they benefit from their new funding round and from the expertise of their new board member Anshu Sharma.

Website: www.GetBlueshift.com