Email advertising company LiveIntent has raised $32.5 million in new funding.
This effectively doubles the amount that LiveIntent has raised. The round was led by private-equity firm FTV Capital, with participation from past investors including Battery Ventures, First Round Capital and Shasta Ventures.
“You need to forget everything you know about email in order to understand LiveIntent,” said founder and CEO Matt Keiser.
And while that’s probably overstating things a bit, Keiser did argue that people have a lot of misconceptions when they hear that LiveIntent does email advertising.
For one thing, it’s important to understand that LiveIntent doesn’t send any emails. Instead, it enables the buying and selling of advertising in emails that publishers were already going to send — in fact, it says it works with more than 400 brands and 750 publishers (including TechCrunch-owner AOL) to reach more than 90 million users every month.
Email is also increasingly important to advertisers as they try to reach consumers across devices and can no longer rely on cookies — a world where, in Keiser’s words, advertisers are trying to reach “people not pixels.” After all, email was “the first channel to be cross-device.” And not only are people reading their email on multiple devices, but it’s also “your digital passport” for many other online services.
“You can’t log into Pandora without it, you can’t get an Uber, you can’t get Amazon, you can’t even sign up for Facebook or Slack,” Keiser said. “So your email address is tied to you as an individual.”
Over time, LiveIntent has become a full platform, Keiser added, thanks to integrations with other marketing tools like Acxiom and Salesforce.com. The funding will help the company build out the platform and expand globally, he said.
The company first launched as a social media platform for online publishers at TechCrunch Disrupt back in 2010.