A little under two weeks after Boston's newest venture capital firm stepped out of stealth mode, Underscore (stylized as _Underscore.VC) announced its second investment: Zaius, the Boston-based behavioral marketing platform that helps consumer brands such as Nine West and Moda Operandi reach customers at the right time across a spectrum of channels.
Zaius said on Wednesday that it has raised an $8 million round (first disclosed in April via a regulatory filing) led by new investor Underscore, with participation from existing investor Matrix Partners and other new investor Leaders Fund. The startup currently employs 23 people between Boston and an office in Leesburg, Va., and this new investment brings its total funding to just over $14 million. It announced the close of its $6.4 million Series A in June 2014.
Mark Gally, CEO of Zaius, told BostInno the funding will be used to expand its sales and marketing teams, make further investments in product development and add partnerships with vendors.
"The marketer today has to think channel agnostically because consumers are interacting across multiple devices and channels."
Founded in 2013 , Zaius helps consumer brands maximize the lifecycle of a customer — as in, gaining new customers and making them loyal — and it does that by tracking their behavior across multiple devices and channels through one customer relationship management platform and then giving those brands the ability to act wherever consumers might be most receptive, whether that be on Facebook, email or push notifications on mobile.
The startup's platform solves a major pain point for marketers, Gally said, by uniting customer interaction data from multiple, disparate marketing tools so that they can see what kinds of actions are driving revenue and then automate points of contact with customers on any channel where there's money-making potential.
"The marketer today has to think channel agnostically because consumers are interacting across multiple devices and channels," Gally said.
Gally wasn't able to share how much his team is expected to grow or any indication of revenue growth, but said that the issue of uniting all customer interactions across multiple devices and channels on one platform is prevalent enough that household brands like Nine West and e-commerce brands like Moda Operandi have signed on as customers. He believes the opportunity to be as big as Salesforce has been for the business-to-business market.
And investors like Michael Skok, co-founder and partner at Underscore, see that.
“It takes a customer-centric approach to solve the massive problems created by years of channel-centric marketing,” Skok said in a statement. "The world’s leading brands are in such pain as their customer interactions fragment and become more real time across web, mobile and social. Zaius is finally bringing this all together."
