The B2B marketing platform Octane11, the first company incubated by MathCapital, a venture fund backed by MediaMath CEO Joe Zawadzki and ad tech vet Eric Franchi, launched on Thursday.
Dan Rosenberg, Octane11 founder and CEO, developed strong feelings about B2B mar tech vendors and where there were unmet needs in the market from his time as chief marketing and strategy officer at MediaMath, he said.
The startup’s business model also mirrors MediaMath, he said, with a platform fee and potential add-ons for data or managed services.
MathCapital, which has marketing technology investments like Thunder, Amino and Hudson MX, leverages the ad tech insider perspective “to find the white space” in digital media, Rosenberg said.
The B2B category was an obvious first move for the fund, he said.
Programmatic companies in particular haven’t capitalized on B2B budgets.
Consumer brands need to reach hundreds of thousands or millions of people to generate and measure sales lift or ROI. But B2B marketers might have a universe of 1,000 or fewer companies, and perhaps 10 or 20 individuals at each company who make purchase decisions.
“For paid media companies, that makes B2B a lot less interesting,” Rosenberg said. And with a relatively low investment in automation and digital measurement, B2B companies devote a much smaller share of paid media budget to programmatic.
Octane11 comes pre-loaded with partnerships for common B2B tech and data hubs, like Oracle Data Cloud, LinkedIn, Salesforce and EverString. It also enlists specialists to fill out specific channel needs, like Bombora’s B2B prospecting data or Intersection, a digital out-of-home company with a B2B business.
“Many are experts in one or a few components of the B2B stack,” Rosenberg said. “We want to improve each partner’s capabilities for B2B marketers by helping them work more in concert.”
Rosenberg said this network will grow quickly in the first year, with a few more vendors likely coming in Q4 and others integrated next year as Octane11 onboards clients and their preferred solutions.
Octane11 has only three clients at launch, he said. None of those are MediaMath customers, but he said there’s a “strong joint value prop” and that it will overlap more as its customers adopt programmatic and as MediaMath’s B2B clients use the software.
