Iterable
Justin Zhu, left, and Andrew Boni, cofounders of Iterable, which is taking on Salesforce and Oracle in the online marketing software market.
- Iterable announced Tuesday that it's raised $60 million in series D funding; the round is the second it's closed this year, and the company expects the financing to take it to profitability.
- The company is challenging the likes of Salesforce and Oracle with a service that helps companies send marketing messages to their customers.
- It plans to use the new funds to further build out its product.
- Below is the pitch deck the company used to raise its latest funding round.
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Iterable is taking on some of the biggest companies in the enterprise computing sector.
Even so, the San Francisco startup's got some big believers among the venture-capital community.
The firm, which offers a service that helps companies send marketing messages to customers, announced Tuesday that it's raised $60 million in series D funding in a round led by Viking Global Investors. The financing is the second for Iterable this year; in March, it closed a $50 million C round that was led by Blue Cloud Ventures. In total, the firm has raised more than $140 million.
By going for a second funding round this year, Iterable was essentially trying to save for a rainy day, company CEO Justin Zhu told Business Insider. It didn't need the financing, but Zhu figured it was a wise idea to add to the company's war chest in case the US's long economic expansion comes to a close sometime soon.
"We just wanted to be prepared for anything that might happen - making sure the company is in a stable condition," he said.
Iterable is facing off against Salesforce and Oracle
Iterable's service allows users to communicate with consumers via text, email, and in-app and website messaging. Analysts and customers consider its product easy to use, and it has already attracted corporate clients including Priceline, Evernote, and Zillow.
Iterable is squaring off against the giant incumbents in the online marketing and customer relationship management software sector - Salesforce, Adobe, and Oracle. Zhu and his team designed Iterable's service so that customers could mix and match it with data warehousing and data analytics services offered by other startups. Clients can choose the best of all services, rather than having to get all three from one of the big cloud-based vendors, which have typically cobbled together their offerings by buying up different startups, Zhu said.
"We work better than any of the cloud solutions," he said.
The firm plans to use its new financing to add new features to its service and to further develop its artificial-intelligence feature, Zhu said. Right now, the feature can already track how often consumers interact with marketing messages Iterable's clients send and can help those clients adjust the frequency with which they send those messages accordingly so they don't annoy their customers.
Iterable also plans to use the financing to add 100 new employees, mostly to its product and engineering teams, Zhu said. The company is planning to reach profitability with the funds it now has on hand, he said.
Here is the pitch deck Iterable used to raise its latest funding round: