EverString, another marketing startup that sells software for personalizing business-to-business sales outreach, has closed a $65 million Series B round.
The funding was led by LightSpeed Venture Partners, along with Sequoia Capital, IDG Ventures, and Lakestar. The San Mateo, Calif.-based company previously raised around $13.7 million in seed and Series A funding.
EverString uses analytics and artificial intelligence technologies to sort through a company's prospects and qualify the leads that are most promising based on historical encounters. It can filter far more information than typical inside sales teams, helping an organization build sales pipelines far more quickly.
Its account list currently includes more than 50 customers, said President and co-founder J.J. Kardwell. The ones willing to be named publicly are mainly from the tech sector: IBM, Microsoft, VMware, and Zenefits. "We don't sell analytics. We help companies increase their conversion rates," Kardwell said.
EverString's co-founders were previously with Summit Partners, where they became intimately familiar with the challenges of selling to business-to-business prospects. The three-year-old company is led by CEO Vincent Yang, who has a background in mathematics and data science. EverString now employs slightly more than 100 people. The new money will go toward sales team research and development, and sales team expansion, Kardwell said.
One of EverString's rivals is Demandbase, which cites customer reference accounts including as Dell, General Electric, and Kelly Services. That company raised $30 million in June, bringing its total to around $90 million.
Other companies to watch closely include Lattice Engines (backed by $75 million) and Leadspace (which has attracted a more modest $35 million.)
EverString's healthy Series B round underscores the demand for better customer data to inform both consumer and business-to-business campaigns. San Francisco-based Segment, another startup seeking to automate the collection and analysis of customer data, raised $27 million in its Series B round last week.
The funding was led by Thrive Capital, with participation from Accel Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Jon Winkelried, the former president of Goldman Sachs.
"Segment provides the infrastructure that makes centralizing and syndicating this data a seamless process," said Thrive Capital partner Will Gaybrick, in a statement. "At the same time, it increases the fidelity and flexibility of your customer data no matter what tools you're using to analyze, visualize or take actions with it."
Segment's customers include Bonobos, Conde Nast, and HotelTonight.
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