Captora, a company led by former Marketo and SuccessFactors executive Paul Albright, announced today that it has raised $22 million in Series B funding.
Albright said he co-founded the company to address some of the challenges he faced in his previous roles, where as chief revenue officer (at Marketo) and chief marketing officer (at SuccessFactors) he tried to increase the productivity of the sales and marketing teams. Ultimately, he decided that one of the most promising avenues was to find more leads and to find them sooner.
When asked for an example of why Captora can make a big difference, Albright said that the vast majority of the “marketing pipeline” from web search comes from people using “branded terms,” i.e. searching for your company or product name. At that point, however, you may be too late, because they’ve probably made up their mind already. Captora can help marketers reach consumers earlier by automatically creating campaigns targeting a wide array of related search terms, optimizing those campaigns based on how consumers respond, and delivering customized content based on the search. (In addition to search, it works with display advertising and social media.)
Even though Captora has largely flown under the radar of the press, the product has been available for about a year now, and the company says it has 30 customers, including Marketo, Salesforce, ServiceMax, SnapLogic, and AppDynamics. Albright said Captora should be useful to a broad range of business and consumer marketers, but he went after those particular companies to show that Captora isn’t competing with the marketing automation and sales software. Instead, it’s complementary, increasing the number of leads that are then managed in those systems.
For ServiceMax, Albright said Captora has created hundreds of different campaigns, so that the company could target searches for all kinds of service software. If a plumber is searching for service software, they’ll now see ServiceMax near the top of the results for “plumbing service software,” and if they click on the link, they’ll find a customized page, making them more likely to actually sign up to learn more.
The new funding follows a $5.25 million Series A. New Enterprise Associates led the round, with Series A investor Bain Capital Ventures participating. NEA General Partner Scott Sandell is joining Captora’s board of directors.