D.C. startup TrackMaven, which offers analysis and intelligence to digital marketers, has closed a $14 million Series B round of financing led by New Enterprise Associates. TrackMaven helps companies understand the result of marketing and how to track marketing content and has been growing fast, moving to bigger offices not long ago. It's also the second funding round for the company this year, after raising $6.5 million back in February.
"Consumers are drowning in content and it is critical that companies create messages that cut through the clutter," said TrackMaven CEO (and 50 on Fire winner) Allen Gannett in a statement."TrackMaven allows marketers to understand data around how competitors use content and unveil key insights to ensure their own content will resonate. Our mission is to make it easy for marketers to proactively identify topics and tactics that will work in real time."
The money will go into all kinds of growth for the company, including more employees and an improved platform. TrackMaven currently employs 40 people Gannet made a point of explaining that the money raised was not a necessity so much as a resource for something big.
"While we didn't need to raise any more money, we decided to because we believe the opportunity in front of us is incredibly large," CEO Allen Gannetwrote in a blog post announcing the funding. "We are lucky to have a group of investors who understand that the future of marketing is in the use of data."
You can read the memo he sent to his employees explaining his thinking about the new funding below.
Mavens,
Today is a big day. As you know, we just announced our $14M Series B. While this is clearly a moment to celebrate, it’s also a chance for us to step back and think about the challenge ahead.
We’re tasked with arming marketers with data they can use to create better content. To this end, we’ve built the best competitive intelligence platform out there. Attracting customers ranging from Fortune 100 brands to tractor distributors to luxury clothing labels, we’ve built a product that people use every day to make significant decisions about what, where, and how to reach their audience.
We’ve also built an incredible team of Mavens who care about building a culture that is focused on communication and care for our customers. To me this is what makes TrackMaven so special. By hiring the best people, communicating well, and being focused on making marketers’ lives better, we’ve been able to accomplish an incredible amount of things in a very short amount of time
With two years under our belts, we have many to go. (The average SaaS company takes nearly 10 years to go public.) In order to continue to grow at our rate, here are just a few of the ways we’ll be using the money:
1. Expanding the Team: Whether it’s Engineering, Customer Success, or Sales, we’re going to be hiring an incredible amount of people to continue to build the leading product in our space and deliver the best customer service in SaaS. However, in doing that, we’re going to be holding ourselves to the same high bar of hiring people who can live the Maven Way. Please take a look at ourCURRENT OPENINGS and let us know if you think of someone who is a good fit for any role.
2. Expanding the Product: Our mission is to provide marketers with actionable data so they can create better content and beat their competitors. To that end, we’ll be working to expand the product in new ways to give marketers specific steps they can take to improve their marketing.
3. Investing in Customer Success: From the beginning, we’ve placed a big emphasis on providing customers with top-tier customer support, training, and service. With this funding, we’ll be investing in significantly growing that team in order to both maintain quality and also get capacity to work on new initiatives (like The Maven Academy, and more cool stuff to come)!
4. Building Out a Unique Training Program: As we continue to grow so quickly, it’s going to be incredibly important that we invest in training our team so that we continue to develop. Whether it’s managing people or SaaS accounting, most companies don’t spend enough time investing in the people at the company. We’re going to build out a training program in 2015 that anyone can participate in to learn a variety of skills.
Our ultimate goal is to build an independent, public company focused on providing marketers with actionable data. We have plenty of work to do, but I know we have the team to do it.
Mavenly yours,
Allen
Chief Maven TrackMaven
