Marketing software and media services provider Integrate raised $5 million on Tuesday, led by Trinity Capital Investment, bringing its total raised funds to $40 million.
Integrate, which started in 2010, provides an integration pipeline to enable lead-gen automation. For example, a client looking to acquire customers within a particular demographic would use Integrate to find a publisher, perform the media buy, upload creative and add incoming data into CRM systems.
Integrate CEO Jeremy Bloom said the company will use the funding to hire both sales and engineering staff.
“We found really good product market fit in B2B,” said Bloom. “We plan to hire more software sales people who can expand our point of view, and we’ll also use some of the capital to invest in tech growth, so hiring engineers that can help us to expand on the software side.”
Integrate hopes to take advantage of the convergence between marketing tech and ad tech.
“They’ve been two very separate worlds until now,” Bloom said. “But now, brands are spending more and more dollars on marketing tech systems. Being able to connect those two worlds together has proved to be challenging.”
It’s a value proposition similar to those given by companies like Lytics and IgnitionOne, as well as tag-management vendors like Ensighten and Tealium.
But Bloom offered some key differentiators.
Companies like Lytics and IgnitionOne, he said, “are less focused on the automation of customer generation than we are and they’re more focused on predictive buying.”
He suggested those companies could be future partners, especially as Integrate plans to build both a partner ecosystem and an app exchange.
Bloom also doesn’t see Integrate as competitive with companies like Ensighten and Tealium, arguing they’re more focused on display advertising. “From our point of view, it doesn’t matter if it’s display, or a search buy, or even event marketing,” he said.
For event marketing, Bloom said Integrate’s software helps marketers pinpoint which channels are performing best and which methods of advertising are generating the most sales.
“For example, if we were to generate 10,000 new business leads for a company, and a hundred of those came from events, Integrate knows the full journey of that lead,” Bloom said. “We know where it was generated, how it was generated and when it was put into the CRM system.”
In the past 12 months, Integrate’s SaaS customer base increased by 50%, and the company doubled its software revenue and grew its B2B revenue by 400%.
Integrate works with more than 250 customers, including brands like Dell, HP and Sony and agencies like MediaVest.
According to CrunchBase, Integrate’s last round of funding was debt financing in 2013. Also noteworthy: Reggie Bradford, SVP of product development at Oracle and formerly CEO of Vitrue (which sold to Oracle in 2012) has been on the Integrate board as of 2014.
Additionally, Oracle Marketing Cloud, which made an ad tech play in early 2014 with its acquisition of BlueKai, has integration issues, as per a recent Forrester Wave report, a problem that Integrate’s technology is designed to help solve.
And to the extent that the marketing cloud is integrated, it has focused on linking Eloqua’s B2B marketing automation tech. And for Integrate, B2B is an area of significant revenue growth.
If all of this is not quite enough to foretell a direct acquisition of Integrate by Oracle down the road, then it at least points to the opportunity for the company as large enterprise cloud software companies invest in — and then strive to integrate — marketing technology assets.
Integrate is in good company.
