Scott Sandell, Ravi Viswanathan, and Rick Yang

Today we are thrilled to announce our investment in Captora, which is revolutionizing demand generation with its cloud marketing solution.

The role of marketing within enterprises has become more expansive and more critical than ever before, and marketers are under growing pressure to increase lead pipeline while lowering customer acquisition cost. Yet these two forces are largely opposed to each other, with increasing volume leading to higher incremental cost.  Marketers are demanding better solutions—resulting in a surge in the marketing software market to $4.7 billion by 2016 *(1) . And none fits the bill like Captora—a platform that solves the problem in a measurable way, helping marketers reach their goal of scaling pipeline volume and lowering customer acquisition cost.

Optimization, scalability, cost effectiveness, and the ability to efficiently leverage big data are all imperative for marketers to execute successful campaigns across the multitude of paid and organic channels available today. Constructing a platform that can meet all of these needs has proven extremely difficult, forcing enterprises to adopt and manage multiple high cost tools with unproven ROI in an attempt to keep up. Captora is maximizing the combination of marketing expertise and technological advancements to dramatically impact marketing revenue growth.

Content marketing has become increasingly important, but effective execution is challenging, time consuming, and costly. Captora enables marketers to optimize hundreds of cross-channel marketing campaigns, personalize engagement, utilize existing content, and identify opportunities – all while lowering the cost of customer acquisition. Their platform captures demand signals generated by marketers’ customers and the broader web with a hyper-targeted approach that achieves early engagement with buyers – even before they know the company’s name!

Our excitement about Captora and its compelling value proposition was easy to validate—in fact, we could have looked no farther than NEA’s existing portfolio. In short order, we’ve witnessed Captora’s platform address acute pain points across numerous businesses and the feedback has been remarkable. Captora also fits squarely into our SaaS 3.0 thesis, leveraging real-time processing of massive amounts of big data to deliver a user-friendly solution that solves a critical business need.

Comprised of world-class experts, the team leading this dynamic market evolution brings unparalleled experience, coming from companies like Marketo, SuccessFactors, Google, and BloomReach. They are passionate about improving the effectiveness of marketing, and we are thrilled to partner with them as they revolutionize the way marketers discover, engage and convert new buyers.

*(1) Source: Gartner