BloomReach Raises $56 Million To Personalize The Web

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Jan. 29, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- BloomReach, one of the leading cloud personalization platform companies, today announced $56 million in Series D funding from top investors in marketing technology, including Bain Capital Ventures, Battery Ventures, Lightspeed Ventures, New Enterprise Associates and Salesforce Ventures. Also demonstrating BloomReach's growing presence, joining its Board of Directors is the CEO and co-founder of Guidewire Software, Inc., Marcus Ryu.

"I'm honored to join the board of BloomReach, a company with the strategic clarity and technology lead to be a major player in the domain of digital commerce," said Ryu.  "Equally important for me is confidence in the customer-focused culture and long-term orientation of the company. I see many of the same values in Raj and his leadership team that were important to my own entrepreneurial journey."

BloomReach now captures data from approximately 20.5 percent of all U.S. e-commerce and currently has more than 175 customers, including 57 from the Internet Retailer Top 500. BloomReach also is experiencing 70 percent in new average contract value (ACV) growth.

With Amazon capturing nearly half of consumers' first product search, other digital businesses are required to invest heavily in marketing technology. However, the marketing technology landscape – with close to 2,000 companies and more than 2,500 products – has become extremely fragmented causing significant confusion for marketers and few breakout companies. As a result, marketers are looking for platforms that provide omnichannel intelligence and reduce redundant technologies.

BloomReach provides a single Personalization Platform that includes BloomReach's proven applications for organic search, personalized site-search and navigation in addition to marketing and merchandising analytics. The products now are broken into two families, including:

• BloomReach Commerce, encompassing BloomReach's Organic Search and SNAP applications, that drives 10-40 percent lift by algorithmically optimizing site experience.
• BloomReach Compass, role-specific analytics providing machine-intelligence insights, KPI management and action-tracking for marketers and merchandisers, that leads to an average $8,000 in monthly revenue for each action taken. With customers like SendGrid, development of BloomReach Compass also has paved the way for BloomReach's further expansion outside of e-commerce.

"At PacSun, we understand that our customers are not only diverse in their affinities for different styles, brands and preferences, but also vary significantly in the ways they connect with our digital channels. We have thousands of products and 2 million pages on the PacSun website, and it can be a challenge for shoppers to find exactly what they want," said Nathan Liu, PacSun vice president for e-commerce. "With all of the technology options available, it makes better business sense to take a platform approach that works across data silos. We turned to BloomReach's Personalization Platform to help connect each and every shopper with the perfect products."

Search engines like Google have redefined consumer expectations for personalized search and experiences; and with its proven success in e-commerce, BloomReach will use the funding to target all digital businesses. According to Gartnerⁱ, "By 2020, smart personalization engines used to recognize customer intent will enable digital businesses to increase their profits by up to 15 percent."

"E-commerce is a $3.5 trillion market, and marketing technology is a big force diving that—with personalization at the core," said Neeraj Agrawal, general partner at Battery Ventures and a longtime investor in marketing tech. "And we are just in the fourth inning of the marketing-tech revolution. I am impressed with BloomReach's growth and am excited to partner with its management team as the company continues to innovate. In addition, after working for several years with Marcus Ryu at Guidewire, I am thrilled to see him join the board of BloomReach and believe his impact will be significant."

While other personalization methods rely mostly on demographic or geographic data, BloomReach sees future opportunities beyond workflow- and transactional-oriented technologies to address one-to-one personalization challenges at scale.

According to Forresterⁱⁱ, "Personalization and contextual relevancy are must-have focuses for optimizing site search … But in order to win, serve, and retain customers, firms today must have search that is more Google-like and does more than just basic list retrieval: It requires new tools with more experience-focused capabilities and a deeper strategic focus on governance, information architecture, and user experience."

"There's a $10-billion opportunity in marketing tech, and BloomReach has the core data-expertise to understand, learn and apply big data to make every experience personal for all digital businesses," said BloomReach co-founder and CEO Raj De Datta. "When the leading investors in our space show their confidence with this level of investment, it tells the entire landscape that BloomReach has the staying power to take the market. And, our growing, unmatched portfolio of customers proves it."

BloomReach plans to use the investment to further strengthen its big-data technology and scale its business globally for all digital businesses. The company currently has more than 250 employees and plans to grow personnel worldwide.

About BloomReach

The BloomReach Personalization Platform understands, matches and personalizes content and products based on what and how people are searching.

With applications for commerce, including organic and site search and category pages, and role-based analytics, the BloomReach Personalization Platform makes content and products more discoverable and relevant, everywhere. BloomReach's core technology – the Web Relevance Engine (WRE) - algorithmically understands content and users, matching this with demand and intent data from across the Web. BloomReach's Commerce Suite has solutions that adapt your content to make it personal and relevant for individual users. The BloomReach Compass suite surfaces actionable product performance and recommendations that maximize revenue.

BloomReach's portfolio of customers include: Neiman Marcus, Sears Outlet, Staples, Drugstore.com, and Williams-Sonoma. Created in 2009, BloomReach is headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., with offices in New York City, London and Bangalore. BloomReach is backed by investment firms Bain Capital Ventures, Battery Ventures, NEA, Salesforce Ventures and Lightspeed Ventures. Learn more: www.bloomreach.com.

About Salesforce Ventures

Salesforce Ventures—Salesforce's corporate investment group—invests in the next generation of enterprise technology to help companies connect with their customers in entirely new ways. Portfolio companies receive funding as well as access to the world's largest cloud ecosystem and the guidance of Salesforce's innovators and executives. With Salesforce Ventures, portfolio companies can also leverage the expertise of the Salesforce Foundation to incorporate its 1-1-1 model of integrated philanthropy to make giving back part of their business model. Salesforce has invested in more than 150 enterprise cloud startups since 2009. For more information, please visit www.salesforce.com/ventures.

ⁱ Gartner Predicts 2016:Predictive Technologies and New Sales Channels Will Escalate Growth; Jason Daiglar, Yanna Dharmasthria, Sandy Shen, Chris Fletcher, Penny Gillespie, Timothy Baynes, Steve Blood, Frank Buytendijk; December 2, 2015
ⁱⁱ Forrester Research, Inc., Google-ize Your Site-Search Experience; Anjali Yakkundi, Dominique Whittaker; October 19, 2015

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SOURCE BloomReach

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http://www.bloomreach.com