NetProspex, a cloud-based data management company focused on B2B marketing, has raised $13 million in Series C funding from Spring Lake Equity Partners.
NetProspex has grown from 78 employees to 110 from the end of 2013 until now. The company plans to utilize its new funding for sales and marketing development, as well as add an estimated 50 to its team by year’s end.
The company spent the past year building out its product line. For instance, it debuted NetProspex Workbench, its own version of a data management platform (DMP) designed to give marketers access to clean and targeted data in which to execute campaigns. While DMPs have been acquisition targets in recent years, the eight-year-old NetProspex believes there is much room for growth on the B2B marketing side of the equation.
“B2C has historically been more advanced in hyper-targeting and sending a message that’s well-crafted to the right person at the right time,” said Michael Bird, CEO of NetProspex. “But make no mistake the technologies are bleeding together…Oracle went from barely acknowledging cloud a few years ago to spending close to $3 billion in acquisitions in the last year [for data and campaign management capabilities].”
Although NetProspex doesn’t execute the actual marketing campaign, it is a data partner to companies that do. These partners include platforms like Salesforce.com, Oracle’s marketing automation platform Eloqua and independent marketing automation company Marketo. Email marketing personalization company Rapleaf, which was acquired by TowerData, also worked with NetProspex to layer social data on top of its marketing contact database to amplify demand generation efforts.
Using NetProspex’s proprietary CleneStep verification technology, marketers essentially tap NetProspex to tell them what’s good or bad about their data in order to optimize the revenue impact of marketing leads.
A common problem for B2B marketers, Bird claimed, is reliance on incomplete or outdated business information. NetProspex solves that by matching B2B data on the company and contact side with third-party data sources and critical company information.
NetProspex licenses data from large third parties, publishers and associations in addition to operating “a very broad, crowdsourced data model that creates a significant business co-op from a contact standpoint,” he said. “We then take that data in from sources [representing] well over 200 million contacts every year in our system.” The result, he said, is a mash up of data and ultimate refining process accessible through NetProspex APIs.
