Zeta Interactive closed a $125 million round of debt and equity funding on Wednesday from GSO Capital Partners, the credit division of Blackstone.
Zeta Interactive, which changed its name from XL Marketing in 2014, is a marketing technology company whose clients include ADT, National Geographic, Time Inc., T-Mobile, US Airways, ConEdison and Century 21.
According COO Steven Gerber, “The money we’ve raised is being earmarked to fuel organic growth and make strategic acquisitions,” and no one is taking money off the table.
Zeta was unable to provide a client to speak on record.
To fuel organic growth, Gerber said Zeta will plug into emerging channels like social commerce and expand integrations with existing partners. Zeta is already integrated with Facebook, for example, but sees adoption of Facebook’s Atlas ad server as a logical next step.
“There’s a constant need to improve real-time scoring and segmentation,” Gerber added. “We believe the next wave of data-driven marketing is moving from big data to fast data and making messaging more relevant to consumers.”
As for acquisitions, Gerber said the past is prologue.
“We play in the data analytics sector,” Gerber said. “Some of our recent acquisitions are instructive of what we will do in the future.”
In 2013, the company acquired Adchemy’s lead-generation and performance-marketing business, Actions. And last year, Zeta snapped up marketing automation platform ClickSquared for an undisclosed sum. Founded in 2007, Zeta had raised $80 million before this round of financing, according to CrunchBase.
Zeta’s main offering is a marketing platform called ZetaHub, which pools marketing data that Zeta manages on behalf of its clients together with data from Zeta’s propriety marketing database. Marketers can use the hub as a self-serve product or as a managed service, and Gerber said the majority of Zeta’s clients opt for either full or partial managed services.
Zeta has nearly 600 employees, up from about 500 one year ago. The company is headquartered in New York with a second US office in Silicon Valley. It also has offices in London and Bristol in the UK, as well as in Banjara Hills, India.
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Zeta will devote some of the new funds to grow its core markets, the US and the UK.
“Our horizon is to double the business again,” Gerber said. “We don’t have a road map to an IPO, and we don’t have a time frame for any type of exit.”
