Toronto-based cloud marketing platform developer Influitive has closed a Series B financing round worth $30.5 million the company says will allow it to expand its offerings and capture a growing opportunity in the field of advocacy marketing.
The round was led by Georgian Partners, and included BDC, OurCrowd, Docomo and Atlas Venture among the other investors. Influitive’s flagship offering is AdvocateHub, its cloud software that seeks to bring together all the tools a marketer needs to engage customers as brand advocates and influencers for their company.
Mark Organ, CEO and founder of Influitive, told ITBusiness.ca that the main focus of this funding round is to further the company’s growth, hire more sales reps and generate more leads for them. There are also plans to bring AdvocateHub to more international markets and expand the products offered as part of the platform. Influitive now has 250 customers and has more than 20,000 active advocates engaging through its platform every month.
Organ said companies in many fast-growing markets are realizing they can grow even faster with advocacy marketing, and there are a number of interesting opportunities emerging for Influitive as it builds up the software in a new category of marketing.
“In a sense this is a recombined space,” noted Organ, pointing out that using technology to drive referrals, or creating a community that’s fun and rewarding for advocates, aren’t new ideas. “Advocacy marketing as a discipline is quite a nascent space, but there are components that have been around for a long time.”
It’s in the way they come together that Influitive sees value and opportunity. Organ points to his first startup Eloqua as an example; that company took three technologies in lead generation, demand management and email marketing that existed separately, and brought them together in a way no one had ever seen before – now owned by Oracle, it’s a leader in a huge new market that didn’t really exist before. He believes Influitive will be a similar story.
The new funding will help to support Influitive’s fast-paced growth. The company is now up to about 100 employees, and is adding two to three weekly to keep up with product demand. Offices in Boston, San Francisco, and Palo Alto complement the Toronto headquarters, and Organ expects to add offices in London and Singapore in the next 12-18 months.
“I’m just back from Singapore and there’s a big opportunity; I’m really excited about what I experienced when I was there,” said Organ. “Within the next 12-18 months we’ll have global coverage for our customers. Increasingly, our large customers like HP, Oracle, Salesforce, Adobe and IBM want to see that we can help them everywhere in the world, not just in North America.”