This article first appeared in our sister publication the Boston Business Journal.
While piling up more funding from Massachusetts investors, a software maker that moved its headquarters to Boston from the Netherlands says it’s ready to tackle legislation changes affecting the company’s U.S. market thanks to its European heritage.
BlueConic, which moved its executive team after Boston-based Sigma Prime Ventures led a previous round in 2014, closed on Thursday $13 million in new funding. Spring Lake Equity Partners, a private equity firm also based in Boston, led the Series B round.
Founded in 2010 by CEO Bart Heilbron and CTO Martijn van Berkum, the company makes a customer data platform that marketers can use to collect data coming from different sources and build data-based profiles for each customer, Heilbron explained.
In Massachusetts, lawmakers are discussing a bill that would create a comprehensive consumer data privacy regime in the state. The bill is modeled on the California Consumer Privacy Act, or CCPA, which introduced new privacy rights for California consumers after taking effect on Jan. 1. CCPA imposes to certain businesses the obligation to create procedures to respond to requests from customers to opt-out of sale of personal information.
Heilbron said BlueConic started to make changes to its platform to address CCPA a couple years ago.
“We built in our platform a very granular system for customers to make their consent on what brands are allowed to do with their data,” Heilbron said. “We built it into our platform very, very deeply from a very, very early stage. It has to do with our European heritage, where those consent laws have been around for a little bit longer than in the U.S.”
In the next 12 months, BlueConic will use part of the fundraise to double its global headcount, now at approximately 80 people. In Massachusetts, Heilbron said he expects to hire over 50 people for the firm’s Leather District headquarters, mostly in marketing and sales, but also data science.
Returning investor Sigma Prime Ventures and angel investors participated in the latest round, which brings the company’s total funding to date to $25 million. More than half of that amount comes from Boston-based investors, according to Heilbron.
