Bluecore, the automated marketing platform for ecommerce brands, has today announced the close of a $35 million Series C round of funding. Norwest Venture Partners led the round, with participation from existing investors including Georgian Partners, FirstMark Capital, and Felicis Ventures.
As part of the deal, NVP’s Scott Beechuk will join the board of directors at Bluecore.
When Bluecore first launched in 2013, the platform allowed marketers to manage their email marketing through simple triggers. With if/then combinations — if the price of jeans drops, send an email to users, for example — marketers were able to set up an automated system of email marketing around their brands and products.
Since then, Bluecore has expanded in two ways.
The first is that the company has developed a machine learning model around its data called Bluecore Predictive. Instead of reacting to changes that happen on the retail level, Bluecore predictive lets marketers be proactive about their email messaging. They can now look for customers who are interested in a certain cut of jeans, and send them email alerts when new SKUs with that cut become available. Or, for example, they can detect which customers are likely to unsubscribe from email alerts and hold off messaging them for a while.
“We’re seeing significant traction with Bluecore predictive,” said co-founder and CEO Fayez Mohamood. “It’s growing twice as fast than our original trigger based product.”
But beyond the deep integration of machine learning, Bluecore has also expanded its marketing channels to include social media and search.
Bluecore boasts more than 400 customers, including Express, Staples, Blue Nile, and Sephora. The company has captured 47 billion real-time behavioral events and driven more than $1 billion in customer revenue to its clients.
The company operates on a SaaS model, based on usage and size of the database, though they declined to provide specific information around pricing. On the low end, Bluecore customers pay tens of thousands of dollars per year, and millions on the high-end, with the average customer spending nearly six figures on the service.
“The greatest challenge is that our customers are bombarded by a lot of products that sound the same,” said Mohamood. “We’ve managed to break through the noise by explaining that we do one thing very very well, but there is a trade-off about how specific we stay with our messaging and how broad our product offering is.”
This latest Series C round brings Bluecore’s total funding to more than $63 million.
[“Source-techcrunch”]