Blueshift Labs, a big data-powered marketing SaaS company, today announced that it has raised a $2.6 million Series-Seed round led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Nexus Venture Partnerswith participation from angel investors including Tim Kopp (former CMO of ExactTarget), Neil Tolaney(Personalization Mall.com and former investor at Technology Crossover Ventures), and Anand Rajaramanand Venky Harinarayan (founders of Kosmix, @WalmartLabs, Junglee and MilliwaysVentures).
Blueshift’s Predictive Marketing Automation software enables ecommerce marketers to convert visitors into repeat buyers and increase activation& retention rates. By using Blueshift, marketers can easily create behaviorally targeted campaigns across multiple channels including email, Display RTB and mobile push notifications. By abstracting away heavy-duty data science into actionable intelligence, Blueshift helps marketers zoom in on the right customers with the highest purchase intent, and helps craft the right combination of products and promotions for each user.
The prevalence of data-driven marketing is undeniable. According to Gartner, CMOs are projected to spend more on IT than CIOs by 2017. “Blueshift’s mission is to enable marketers to use the power of big fast data to build deeper relationships with their customers,” said Vijay Chittoor, co-founder & CEO of Blueshift. “Customers are interacting with brands and e-tailers across multiple digital touchpoints and CMOs are increasingly realizing the need to develop unified cross-channel communication with their users.”
Blueshift has demonstrated strong results with beta customers like Naturebox, an Internet Retailer 500 company. “Blueshift has become an essential partner for us in improving retention & activation rates. With a very easy integration, we are able to run multiple automated campaigns on email & Display RTB, all powered by Blueshift's segmentation,” said Kenneth Chen, co-founder & CMO of Naturebox. “We are seeing upto 148 percenthigher conversion rates when we use Blueshift’s predictive intelligence in our campaigns. Blueshift truly feels like a product built for marketers by marketers.”
The Blueshift team is comprised of an experienced group of marketers who led the development of platforms that drove $3 billion in gross annual sales at Walmart &Groupon; they have a deep background in applying big data to help brands and e-tailers engage with their customers.
“We are thrilled about the opportunity to partner with the team as they pioneer Predictive Marketing Automation for e-commerce,” said Kittu Kolluri, general partner at NEA.
"Blueshift's data driven workflow automation vastly simplifies the complexities that B2C marketers are facing with explosion of data and proliferation of channels," says Jishnu Bhattacharjee, managing director at Nexus Venture Partners.
About Blueshift Labs
San Francisco-based Blueshift Labs is the leader in Multichannel Predictive Marketing Automation for ecommerce. Using the power of behavioral targeting and predictive analysis, Blueshift enables ecommerce marketers to convert visitors to their site and app into repeat buyers. The Company is funded by prominent venture capital and angel investors, including New Enterprise Associates, Nexus Venture Partners & Great Oaks VC.
About NEA
New Enterprise Associates, Inc. (NEA) is a global venture capital firm focused on helping entrepreneurs build transformational businesses across multiple stages, sectors and geographies. With approximately $13 billion in committed capital, NEA invests in technology and healthcare companies at all stages in a company’s lifecycle, from seed stage through IPO. The firm's long track record of successful investing includes more than 195 portfolio company IPOs and more than 320 acquisitions since its founding in 1977. In the U.S., NEA has offices in Menlo Park, CA; Boston, MA; New York, NY; Chicago, IL; and the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. In addition, New Enterprise Associates (India) Pvt. Ltd. has offices in Bangalore and Mumbai, India and New Enterprise Associates (Beijing), Ltd. has offices in Beijing and Shanghai, China. For additional information, visit www.nea.com.
About Nexus Venture Partners
Nexus Venture Partners is a leading Venture Capital firm with over $600mn under management, and an active portfolio of over 50 companies across technology, Internet, media, consumer, and business services sectors. The team has invested in a variety of companies leading to numerous successful public offerings and M&A transactions. Nexus portfolio companies include Cloud.com, Gluster, Pubmatic, DimDim, helpshift, 0xdata, Elastic Box, Snapdeal.com, Netmagic, Druva and Unmetric. To learn more about Nexus Venture Partners, visit:www.nexusvp.com.
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