BrightFunnel Raises $6M to Help Enterprise Companies Measure and Optimize Marketing's Impact on Revenue

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 2, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- As data-driven marketing goes mainstream, BrightFunnel, developer of a powerful revenue attribution and forecasting platform that helps B2B marketers turn campaigns into profits, today announced that it has raised a $6 million Series A investment led by Crosslink Capital.  Salesforce Ventures has also joined the round along with earlier investors Bloomberg Beta, Karlin Ventures, and Resolute Ventures. With funding from this round, BrightFunnel will expand product development, sales, and marketing efforts. David Silverman, Partner, Crosslink Capital will join the BrightFunnel Board of Directors.

"BrightFunnel, which is built on top of technologies like Impala and Hadoop, makes advanced marketing analytics easy and accessible to our entire marketing team," said Alan Saldich, VP of Marketing, Cloudera. "We now have a single source of truth about the impact of marketing so that our team and company leadership are on the same page, while it's easier than ever to get insights from the platform to manage and measure our channels and campaigns effectively."

BrightFunnel Data Insights: Marketing Working Harder than Ever to Close Deals BrightFunnel also released key data insights from its marketing attribution and forecasting platform, which found that:

• Compared to 2014, closing a deal required 52% more marketing campaign touches in 2015 while lead-to-revenue cycles increased 32% during the same time period.
• For deals closed in 2015, it took an average of 17.6 campaign touches from Lead to Close.
• Half of marketing touches occur during the sales cycle. The total number of touches was roughly evenly split between pre sales cycle (53% of touches), and during the sales cycle (47%).
• The average sales cycle for "high growth" technology companies in 2015 is 108 days while the overall lead-to-revenue cycle is 512 days. In other words, technology marketers are spending more than twelve months nurturing leads before they hit the sales pipeline.

"BrightFunnel allows marketers to finally measure the impact their campaigns are having on revenue," said David Silverman, Partner, Crosslink Capital. "I personally invested in Omniture and see BrightFunnel poised to have a similar impact as this generation's premier B2B marketing analytics platform." 

Founded in 2013, BrightFunnel has raised nearly $10M to date. This latest round of financing builds on an exceptional year for the company. It has grown revenues 14% to 15% month-over-month, winning key deals with leading enterprise companies including Cloudera, Five9, and New Relic. Since its last round of funding, BrightFunnel's customer base has quadrupled, and the company's headcount has more than doubled, attracting executives with deep B2B marketing expertise from companies like ON24, InsideView, and Leadspace.

"The length and complexity of the enterprise buying cycle has increased dramatically over the last decade, with more marketing touches required to turn a lead into revenue," said Nadim Hossain, Co-Founder and CEO, BrightFunnel.  "Companies like Nimble Storage and ServiceMax rely on our data-driven approach to analyze their marketing activities. BrightFunnel gives them the confidence to invest in those programs that improve demand generation performance across the funnel, accelerating their pipelines, and increasing revenue."

About BrightFunnel
BrightFunnel is a developer of a powerful revenue attribution and forecasting platform that helps enterprise marketers turn campaigns into profits. Through the company's multi-touch attribution and intelligent forecasting approach, marketers and executives can now understand the revenue impact of every decision, and align marketing plans with business priorities. For more information, visit www.brightfunnel.com and read our blog at www.brightfunnel.com/blog.

About Crosslink Capital
Crosslink is a leading stage-independent venture capital and growth equity firm that invests in digital media and Internet services, software and business services, communications services and infrastructure, and cloud computing. The firm was one of the first and largest in the U.S. to integrate public and private growth/technology investing and maintains an active seed fund – a strategy that allows Crosslink to develop early, long-term partnerships with its portfolio companies and offer entrepreneurs a true landscape perspective on their industries. For more information visit http://www.crosslinkcapital.com.

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.

SOURCE BrightFunnel