Integrate Raises $8M To Bring Upper-Funnel Intel To B2B Marketers

Seven-year-old mar tech startup Integrate has raised $8 million in a Series D growth round, bringing its total financing to $35 million.

New investor Iron Gate Capital led the equity round with participation from existing investors Foundry Group and Forte Ventures.

Other investors include mar tech luminaries like Scott Dorsey, founder and CEO of ExactTarget (Salesforce); Reggie Bradford, founder of Vitrue (Oracle); David Karnstedt, former CEO of Efficient Frontier (Adobe); and Dan Springer, former CEO of Responsys (Oracle).

No investors took money off the table, according to CEO Jeremy Bloom, who noted that Integrate has been cash-flow positive for about four consecutive quarters and is under no pressure to exit.

This Series D was necessary as Integrate identifies areas for product expansion, he added.

It plans to use the growth capital to expand its sales and business development operation, as well as to hire 15-20 additional people in product and engineering to zero in on demand generation at the top of the funnel.

Integrate’s software sits just above marketers’ CRM and marketing automation systems. It acts as a connector to filter leads flowing between a marketer’s database and the ad tech ecosystem, like publishers, content syndication platforms and display-oriented DSPs.

“When we talk about automating the top of the funnel, we’re saying let’s go across the ad tech stack and centralize all of these data points for B2B marketers,” Bloom said.

“Where we’ve made tremendous progress is in areas around demand generation, from search, display and social [to] content syndication, call centers and centralizing data from webinars and events.”

Integrate has benefited from the B2B frenzy known as account-based marketing (ABM).

While the concept of account targeting is not new, platforms like LinkedIn and Demandbase have helped the practice scale.

But Integrate is developing an ABM solution for programmatic display to meet the needs of B2B marketers who are under pressure to improve the efficiency of their marketing spend.

“Marketers are getting smarter about what companies are actually in a buying cycle, and more importantly, what context of that account matter,” Bloom said. “If you’re marketing to another person in marketing, that person is not going to make a decision on a purchase agreement, regardless of whether the company is in-market for the product.”

So Integrate would vet leads and ensure information (like phone number and email address) are up to date, while identifying behavioral signals around intent.

“We’re able to prioritize those leads in the CRM as a result,” Bloom said, “so if you’re a salesperson at Dell selling servers, you would get 100 leads stack ranked for companies late in a cycle, early in a cycle, and you can sort out which leads you need to nurture and which you can go for the hard close.”

This post was syndicated from Ad Exchanger.