Data Analytics Startup Beckon Raises $8M As Marketers Look Beyond Generic Tools

Beckon, a California-based startup that helps marketers track their spend using data analytics, has raised $8 million in Series A funding from August Capital and Canaan Partners.

The latest funding brings total capital raised by Beckon to $10 million to date (including $2 million seed round from August).

As we wrote earlier this year, Beckon helps marketers consolidate all data and insights coming from different sources including emails where users just mark Beckon on the cc (much like Evernote), so all that data is available real time. With its “Flipboard-like dashboard” and easy to use tools, the startup is filling a crucial void for marketers at a time when there are numerous off-the-shelf packages for finance and HR professionals and thousands of apps for several other enterprise utilities.

“Marketing has long struggled for credibility at the C-levels because it’s never had a marketing system of record — until now,” said Ross Fubini of Canaan Partners.

For its part, Beckon has already got some big name customers including StubHub, Converse and Nokia.

Jennifer Zeszut, CEO and co-founder of Beckon who sold her last startup, Scout Labs for $22.5 million in May 2010, said marketers are open to experimenting with solutions like Beckon.

“Marketers will always experiment — that’s the name of the game. But a marketing team that is experimenting without a normalized way to gauge what it delivered at what cost is lighting dollar bills on fire. Marketing needs a platform that supports both experimentation and accountability, and that’s Beckon.”

Like many enterprise startups, Beckon is hoping that customers using similar products from SAP, IBM and SAS would switch because of better user experience and leaner pricing models.

“Clearly, the big enterprise players (SAP, IBM, SAS, etc.) have deep data integration and analytical capabilities, no doubt. But they offer classically terrible user experiences and rely heavily on services to deliver, so they have very long timelines (usually measured in years) and very big price tags,” added Zeszut. 

Beckon was founded in 2011 by Zeszut and Jochen Frey (CTO), who had earlier co-founded Scout Labs.