Percolate is announcing that it has raised $40 million in Series C funding.
I’ve written previously about the company’s social media tools, which allow marketers to find and publish content on social networks. (It works on mobile too.)
Co-founder and President James Gross (pictured above with his co-founder Noah Brier) said that’s still a big part of what the company does, and what it’s recognized for, but the product has expanded to become a complete “system of record” for marketing teams.
Put another way, the company says the average Fortune 500 business uses 50 different pieces of software throughout the marketing process, and Percolate offers a single platform for managing all of that. That includes tools for planning a marketing campaign, creating a brief to guide that campaign, coordinating the campaign within teams and with external partners, pushing that campaign across areas like email and search (and of course social media), and finally for monitoring the campaign and determining how well it performs over time.
“What we’re trying to give you, the CMO, is the ability to understand all the planning, all the production,” Gross said. He added that while he thinks Percolate’s platform already lives up to his claims of comprehensiveness, “We’re going to have to build software until the end of time if we want to be this system of record. That’s the challenge we have — for a lot of marketing, the plumbing isn’t there yet.”
For example, he said it’s not yet possible to set up an automated campaign that buys TV ads alongside online channels like Facebook and display, but he hopes to get there eventually.
Percolate’s clients include Unilever, Airbnb, Pinterest and ad conglomerate WPP. The company says its customer base grew by 200 percent in the last year.
The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with existing investors Sequoia Capital, GGV Capital, First Round Capital and Lerer Hippeau Ventures also participating. Percolate has now raised a total of $74.5 million.
With the new funding, Gross said New York City-headquartered Percolate will expand its presence in the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as opening new offices in Europe, Asia and Latin America. And acquisitions will become “a big focus,” too.
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