Faraday Raises $880K Series A to Reinvent Customer Acquisition

MIDDLEBURY, Vt., March 20, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Faraday, a cloud software provider delivering better customer acquisition to the home improvement industry, announced today the close of a $880,000 Series A round of financing. The oversubscribed financing was led by FreshTracks Capital, with renewable energy services provider 3Degrees, seed-stage venture investor LaunchCapital, environmental opportunities focused investor ARB, and a number of individual investors including several cleantech executives also participating. Cairn Cross, Managing Director of FreshTracks Capital, and Richard Graves, Co-Founder and VP of Corporate & Business Development at Ethical Electric, joined the company's board of directors.

Faraday's software-as-a-service (SaaS) application improves its users' customer acquisition metrics by revealing the best strategies for winning new business. The application helps users generate targeting hypotheses, facilitates multi-channel outreach through a network of vendors, and tracks results to highlight the best-performing approaches. Also included is a predictive analytics engine that identifies customers most likely to convert.

In 2013 Faraday worked with seven clients in five states, analyzing over 800,000 households for their propensity to invest in home upgrades.

"One thing we've learned in the Big Data era is that there are no more rules of thumb, and that holds true with customer acquisition," said Andy Rossmeissl, Faraday's CEO. "We're helping our users discover what works for their businesses through very carefully managed, instrumented trial and error, leading to better customer conversion at lower cost."

Faraday's current customers come from the residential solar and energy efficiency industries, where the cost of acquiring a customer is 5–8 times higher than for other home improvements.

"3Degrees works with over a dozen utilities across the U.S. selling renewable energy to consumers. We believe there is great potential for the industry to reduce the cost of customer acquisition, and Faraday's approach shows true promise," said Dan Kalafatas, 3Degrees's CEO.

Faraday will use the funds to build out its team and launch the next generation of its platform. Coincident with the financing, the company hired Bill Morris as Lead Visualization Engineer and Tristan Davies as Front-end Engineer. Bill, a renowned web mapping expert, brings over a decade of experience in geospatial analysis and visualization to the company, while Tristan joins Faraday from his own successful online gaming company to lead the development of Faraday's web and mobile clients.

"During the last twelve months, Faraday has identified an important market pain point, developed an intriguing solution drawing from their experience with machine learning, and produced great early traction," said Cairn Cross, Managing Director at FreshTracks Capital. "We think Faraday could be the Salesforce.com of predictive marketing."

About Faraday: Faraday (faraday.io) brings the scientific method to customer acquisition. The company's software empowers consumer marketers to target, launch, and track experimental marketing campaigns and discover winning strategies for finding new business. Founded in late 2012 by the senior staff of the award-winning enterprise sustainability service provider Brighter Planet, the company is headquartered in Middlebury, Vermont.

About FreshTracks: FreshTracks Capital L.P. (www.freshtrackscap.com) is a venture capital firm based in Shelburne, VT with 3 funds and 28 portfolio companies.  Some of the firm's most notable Vermont investments include: EatingWell (acquired by Meredith), Vermont Teddy Bear, Draker Energy, NEHP (acquired by Critical Process Systems), Quirky and BuysideFX.  FreshTracks focuses its investment in private seed and early stage businesses, primarily companies in Vermont or in close geographic proximity to Vermont.  The firm was founded by Cairn Cross and Charlie Kireker in 2000, and is currently managed by General Partners Cairn Cross, Tim Davis & Lee Bouyea.

About 3Degrees:  3Degrees connects people with renewable energy on a massive scale.  3Degrees partners with utilities to offer green power options to 25 million customers and provides renewable energy certificates and carbon offsets to Fortune 500® companies, green building firms, utilities, and other organizations committed to sustainability.  A six-time winner of the DOE/EPA Green Power Supplier of the Year Award and certified B Corporation, 3Degrees is headquartered in San Francisco, California, with regional offices throughout the U.S.  To learn more, visit 3degreesinc.com.

About LaunchCapital: LaunchCapital (launch-capital.com) was founded in January 2008 with a mission to help entrepreneurs gain quick access to seed capital and mentorship. With investments in over 100 companies, LaunchCapital has a core focus in technology, consumer and medical businesses. The nine-person team has syndicated investments with over 50 venture firms and 1000 angel investors. They currently have offices in Cambridge, Mass., New Haven, New York City and Palo Alto.

About ARB: ARB is a private investment company that holds and manages a portfolio of private company, private equity fund and project equity investments. ARB invests in environmental opportunities that are responding to and benefitting from the economic realities related to climate change. ARB invests in renewable energy technologies and services, water technologies and services, waste to value, energy efficiency, biomass and biofuels, and sustainable agriculture.

SOURCE Faraday