Tag Management Company Tealium Raises $10.5M From Battery

Tealium, a startup that allows marketers to manage their website tags without going through IT, just raised $10.5 million in a Series B round of funding from Battery Ventures.

Battery partner Neeraj Agrawal, who’s joining the Tealium board, tells me the firm has been making big bets on marketing tech. That’s because marketers are playing a more critical role in their companies, rather than just taking a backseat to the sales team. And they’re making decisions that are increasingly driven by data — as Agrawal put it, marketers have evolved from being traditional Madison Avenue types and are becoming more like “the guys on Wall Street.”

Website tags are a key tool for collecting and using that data, because they allow companies to connect their websites with third-party services like Omniture (analytics), ExactTarget (email marketing), and Marketo (marketing). With Tealium, companies can manage their tags without an application server, eliminating a potential point of failure. And marketers can manage the tags themselves, without having to know anything about JavaScript or wait for assistance from their IT departments.

By removing the bottleneck of IT approval, Agrawal says marketers are able to “control their own destiny,” because they have more flexibility to try out different services. The IT department, meanwhile, no longer has to spend time on work it considers “not very strategic.”

In the first half of 2012, Tealium says its revenue grew 700 percent compared to the same period last year, and it added 60 paying enterprise clients (bringing the total to more than 100). New clients include the National Hockey League, Fox Networks Group, Volvo, and Nokia.

In addition to customer momentum, Agrawal says he was attracted by the management team, which comes from WebSideStory, an analytics and business optimization company that was acquired by Omniture (which was in turn acquired by Adobe).

Tealium previously raised a $1.1 million Series A.