The ecommerce marketing software firm Bluecore on Wednesday announced a $21 million Series B funding round led by Georgian Partners.
The company’s terms or valuation were not disclosed, nor were they disclosed during a $6 million Series A in January.
Despite the recent round, Bluecore co-founder and CEO Fayez Mohamood told AdExchanger that “it got to the point where we bottlenecked in growth building new products and investing in new channels.”
The company says it has been adding more than $1 million in annual recurring revenue every 45 days, and since building out an enterprise team earlier this year, Bluecore has taken on brands like Staples, Calvin Klein and Under Armour as clients.
Mohamood said the Series B investment will help grow headcount – the company went from 15 to 63 employees in the past 12 months, with expectations of tripling over the next year. An outsized investment will go to data scientists and engineers.
“We hope to expand beyond ecommerce,” said Mohamood, “because we entered that primarily as a market opportunity, and specialization is the key.”
Bluecore is testing products across alternate channels, but the company’s current bread and butter (and meat and potatoes) is real-time email triggering. The company’s software enables automation for discounts and specific products based on online gift carts, wish lists and browsing, as well as supply chain concerns like out-of-stock statuses or inventory management.
Mohamood said the funding will help move forward plans to add more ecommerce offerings, such as display, mobile and even print optimization products, as well as an alternate suite for a category like hotels and hospitality.
Georgian Partners has a portfolio that has featured ecommerce and marketing information, including Shopify, Tealium and DataCandy, and that customer analytics background was part of the reason behind going with the VC, according to Mohamood.
“We were particularly impressed with Bluecore’s use of applied analytics to automatically optimize entire processes end to end,” said Justin LaFayette, a managing partner at Georgian Partners.
The immediacy of email targeting has proven invaluable so far this holiday season. LaFayette said one of the appeals of Bluecore’s service is “the timely injection of insights into critical business processes.”
Search remains the dominant channel in ecommerce referral sales, controlling 47.5% of the market, but email (which accounts for 4.7% of sales) is the only other category to gain share in the past two years, with direct-to-site, social and display all stagnating.
