Persado Raises $15 Million Round Led by Bain Capital Ventures

NEW YORK, Feb. 13, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Persado, creator of data-driven marketing software, today announced $15 million in Series A funding, led by Bain Capital Ventures. The company plans to use the capital to significantly expand its sales and marketing efforts, more than double its spend on R&D, and establish a new headquarters in New York City.

Language is the common element in every digital marketing pitch, ranging from the brief snippets of search engine ads and e-mail subject lines to mobile messages, social messages and website landing pages. Persado has created marketing persuasion technology that transforms the manual message creation required in today's multi-channel digital marketing into a software- and data-driven approach that automatically generates and selects the marketing messages that work best. Marketing persuasion technology increases campaign effectiveness by combining structured maps of buying emotions and a massive database of marketing vocabulary, and learns from actual consumer responses to messages in order to constantly improve results.

"Marketing persuasion technology has significantly impacted the results we achieve via messages to our users," said Omer Shai, VP of Marketing at Wix.com, a leading provider of professional website creation tools. "Persado solves the difficult problem of generating the best-performing marketing messages specifically for our customers and our products. We are excited to expand our collaboration into more of our digital marketing campaigns, channels, and product lines."  

Other current customers of Persado's marketing persuasion technology include Skype, the premier global VOIP provider, with over 660 million members; Badoo, the world's largest and fastest-growing social network for meeting new people, with over 170 million members; and TIM Brazil, one of South America's leading mobile network operators, with over 70 million customers, among others.

Advanced digital marketers have a wide variety of quantitative, data-driven tools available to them today to target, segment and price offerings to consumers – but have not found an effective way to craft the phrases that reliably persuade customers to act. Instead, marketers are forced to blindly create messages with limited insight into their potential customer impact. Persado replaces this guesswork by applying advanced statistical techniques to large datasets in order to rapidly and efficiently generate and test a large number of digital messages and determine the most powerful language to improve response rates and conversion for a given offer.

"The creation of the most effective marketing messages is a universal problem and a highly manual process for digital marketers today," said Bain Capital Ventures partner Deepak Sindwani. "Persado solves this problem through its unique data science, software, and information service, systematically generating the best messages across all online marketing channels, for any product and any customer, at any time. We are excited to partner with Persado to pursue this enormous market opportunity and build the next great company in online marketing." 

Persado CEO and founder Alex Vratskides, previously the CEO and founder of Upstream Systems, a leading mobile marketer, spent years and invested millions of dollars building and testing Persado's technology with demanding enterprise clients worldwide.

"Working with CMOs of customers on five continents reaching over a billion consumers, I became increasingly frustrated at the limitations of old methods of engaging and persuading customers to act" says Vratskides. "Persado's marketing persuasion technology is a ground-breaking application of mathematics to emotions, products and language. Where others see sentences and phrases comprising an offer, we are unique in seeing multi-dimensional vector spaces that can be efficiently explored. With this funding round, we are excited to bring this innovation to a broader marketplace of digital marketing customers." 

About Persado
Persado is the leader in marketing persuasion technology, a new category within digital marketing. The company provides marketing software through a managed SaaS platform to leading enterprise and Internet consumer marketers, including Fortune 500 clients in the telecom, financial services, retail, and gaming sectors. Persado is currently deployed with customers in the United States, Europe, and South America, and typically integrates with customer's CRM, content, and advertising platforms. For more information, please visit www.persado.com.

About Bain Capital Ventures
Bain Capital Ventures is the venture arm within Bain Capital, which has approximately $66 billion of assets under management worldwide. The firm's history of investing in early stage companies dates back to 1984 with over 125 venture investments since inception. Bain Capital Ventures manages $2.0 billion of assets, has over 70 active portfolio companies, and has offices in Boston, New York, and Palo Alto. The firm has helped steer many ideas to success by working in partnership with management teams, pairing talented and passionate entrepreneurs with industry experts, opening doors to customers, and collaborating on long-term strategies. For more information, please visit www.baincapitalventures.com.

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SOURCE Persado