Captora Raises $22M to Accelerate Market Leadership

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA–(Marketwired – May 20, 2014) – Captora today announced the company raised $22 million in Series B financing, led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) with participation by Series A lead Bain Capital Ventures. Captora helps modern marketers discover, engage, and convert future buyers, turning multi-channel marketing into sales pipeline.

As part of this financing round, NEA General Partner Scott Sandell, lead investor in dozens of successful technology companies including Workday, Tableau, Salesforce, WebEx, and Data Domain, joins the Captora board to partner with the company on achieving its vision to revolutionize new buyer acquisition for marketers.

Captora has secured over 30 customers, including Marketo, Salesforce, ServiceMax, SnapLogic, and AppDynamics, in the first year of product availability — demonstrating the urgent need for technology that optimizes content and conversion-driven marketing campaigns across marketing channels such as search, advertising, and social.

“Tomorrow’s most successful cloud technology companies will deliver a platform that includes significant domain expertise that makes marketers’ lives easier,” said NEA General Partner Scott Sandell. “Captora offers marketers an entirely new way to grow pipeline more effectively by leveraging existing content across the overwhelming number of marketing channels available today. The company’s founding team brings unique experience and leadership to deliver on this vision and we were very impressed by their progress to date.”

Founding team CEO Paul Albright, CTO Anindo Mukherjee, and CPO Srihari Kumar, together have decades of experience leading companies dedicated to helping marketers achieve their goals faster and more efficiently using cloud technologies.

“Captora is leading a new era for marketing with an adaptive marketing solution that combines data, content, and optimization to automatically scale multi-channel campaigns. And Captora enhances our customers’ investment in marketing automation and CRM solutions by driving new buyers into their funnel, often before they know our customers’ brands,” said Paul Albright, Captora Co-Founder and CEO. “Bain Capital Ventures is a great partner and I am thrilled to work with NEA as Captora extends our leadership position in this emerging market.”

Albright, most recently Chief Revenue Officer at Marketo (MKTO), has previously held executive roles at market-leading companies such as SuccessFactors (SAP), NetApp (NTAP), and Informatica (INFA). Mukherjee held technology leadership positions at Google (GOOGL) and BloomReach. Kumar was co-founder and CEO of LeadFormix, sold to CallidusCloud (CALD), where he served as VP & GM of the Marketing Automation division. Kumar has also been a co-founder or early executive at a string of successful companies such as Yodlee, Ringcube (CTXS), and VXTrme (MSFT).

“Captora is the first company to take a data-driven approach to the challenge of Adaptive Marketing which allows marketers to discover, engage, and convert new buyers by intelligently and automatically scaling content-driven campaigns across multiple channels,” said Ajay Agarwal, Managing Director at Bain Capital Ventures. “We are thrilled with the progress Captora has made since 2012 when they began incubating the concept in our Palo Alto offices. We’re excited to welcome NEA as new investors — they bring strong SaaS experience to Captora as we continue to scale the company.”

Captora is experiencing rapid business growth as a result of helping marketers create a data-driven strategy to reliably discover, engage, and convert new buyers. Sample results include:

• Conversion rates: 50%+ improvement across organic and paid search and advertising channels
• Cost per Lead: 40%+ improvement of the cost of acquiring new buyers in under three months
• Lead volume: 10-20%+ increases on average in less than six months

Captora will be using the additional funds to grow its team, expand the product family, and to move into new geographies as the company helps more and more marketers dramatically increase new lead volume while improving their cost per lead. Captora is hiring for multiple roles, which can be found on the Careers page of the company website.

About Captora
With Captora Adaptive Marketing, marketers discover, engage, and convert new buyers by intelligently and automatically scaling content-driven campaigns across multiple channels (search, advertising, and social). Using advanced data analysis techniques and automated technologies, Captora not only dramatically increases new leads, but also significantly reduces the cost of acquiring of new buyers. Captora customers include AppDynamics, Eucalyptus, International Culinary Center, Marketo, Salesforce ExactTarget, ServiceMax, and SnapLogic. For more information visit www.captora.com