Today, we are excited to announce our investment in Sailthru. From Marco Polo’s early trade routes to today, remembering vastly different customers likes and dislikes is what allows any business to survive and thrive. As ancient as the practice of revenue optimization may be, it remains wide open territory with new frontiers for innovative companies to deliver even better business performance, simpler and more cost effectively. At Scale Venture Partners, we’ve seen this proven repeatedly through more than a half dozen investments in companies that sell SaaS into the marketing suite. And, we’ve seen it again in our latest investment, Sailthru.
Here’s how we think about Sailthru: Revenue Optimization = Real Time + (AI) Alogrithmic Intelligence + CRM + Omni-Channel / All-In-One
No doubt next-generation marketing is becoming more sophisticated and delivering more value by the day. Often though, it takes a very large enterprise to realize that value by spending significant amounts of money to customize various software systems and hiring dedicated teams to manage the inputs and outputs. Luckily, for the vast majority of businesses the emergence of SaaS in every category is taking the best of breed from these larger enterprise systems, consolidating them onto one software platform, and automating much of the day-to-day processes. In business to business (B2B) marketing, a whole category around marketing automation, or lead nurturing, has emerged and created several billion dollar companies in Hubspot, ExactTarget, Marketo, and Eloqua.
But in the Business to Consumer (B2C) market, Sailthru is creating massive value for consumer marketers by automating and optimizing consumer engagement and the purchasing funnel. Sailthru’s revenue optimization technology captures data across all mediums (web, mobile, social media, e-mail), stores it in a modern architecture, and markets back to those consumers in an automated fashion, across the most appropriate channel for that individual. Each marketing message, time, and frequency is personalized to that consumer and her habits. With no two consumers receiving the same marketing message at the same time or in the same place, each individual receives a personalized marketing message that is meaningful to them. And, marketers optimize revenue, engagement, and conversion.
Sailthru truly delivers on its brand name; Customers come in and come back, and marketers no longer need to integrate disparate and complex systems, hire data analysts to run complex database queries, or spend significant resources to build complex customer segments.
With such an innovative product and insightful team, we couldn’t be more excited to be working with Neil Capel and everyone on the Sailthru team. We’re also excited to be joining fellow investors Benchmark and RRE Ventures. As we’ve seen before with great companies and leadership teams like Omniture, ExactTarget, Vitrue, HubSpot, BrightRoll, DataSift and DemandBase, we see great things ahead for Sailthru.