Sailthru, a provider of data marketing and personalization solutions, has raised $20 million in Series C financing from ScaleVP, whose past investments include cloud-based marketing technology companies like HubSpot, Omniture, Vitrue and ExactTarget.
Sailthru’s founder and CEO Neil Capel, a venture partner at Bowery Capital, said the funding will go toward sales, marketing, product engineering and international expansion.
The New York-based company founded in 2008 has raised a total of $48 million in financing and opened a London office after its $19 million injection from Benchmark Capital last winter. Its total headcount at 150 is almost doubled from 85 last year.
Sailthru’s customer base spans publishers like Thrillist and SpinMedia to retail brand Alex and Ani and commerce marketplace OpenSky; the Sailthru use case differs by vertical, but in general companies use its solutions to deliver individualized content or messaging to consumers based on prior interactions, regardless of whether those interactions took place on a handset, tablet or desktop.
While some Sailthru features resemble marketing automation or email marketing solutions, Capel said describing Sailthru solely as either would be inaccurate. “We have these feature sets that would sort of fit in those buckets, but we are a full, closed-loop solution designed to engage that end user and mobile is an extension of that,” he said. “We want to know how frequently a user interacts with a brand.”
The spree of consolidations around email marketing and marketing automation in just the last year (consider Salesforce and ExactTarget, Adobe and Neolane, Oracle and Eloqua) has not gone un-noticed by Capel, who sees it as an attempt by the acquiring companies to “provide this mass-market, real personalization, which is why you’re seeing all of this consolidation in the market.”
Capel, however said that the all-in-one solutions that these acquisitions beget still subscribe to “campaign-oriented architecture.”
“It’s great for us because its really unifying the market, but it’s still this segmentation approach,” he said. “We want everything about a single user to be stored [by individual profiles] so you can have a true dialogue with that consumer.”
