It’s been quite a year at TrackMaven. We now have hundreds of the world’s leading brands as customers, have moved offices, raised a Series A financing, tripled the size of the team, and launched lots of new features.
Adding to a whirlwind year, today we’re announcing our $14M Series B financing. The equity and debt financing is being led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) with participation from Bowery Capital, Silicon Valley Bank, and more.
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. We are lucky to have a group of investors who understand that the future of marketing is in the use of data.
Fundraising is often an over-hyped part of the company-building process, so while we’re excited, I wanted to share with you the memo I sent to our team. I think it does the best job describing why we raised this round and how we’re going to use it to improve marketers’ lives. You can also find a copy of the press release below the memo.
Memo to Team TrackMaven
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 our current 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
TrackMaven Closes $14 Million In Series B Financing
Competitive Intelligence Platform to Continue Rapid Growth
Washington, D.C. – TrackMaven, a competitive intelligence platform for digital marketers, announced today that it has closed a $14 million Series B financing led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) with participation from Silicon Valley Bank and Bowery Capital. TrackMaven provides marketers with the ability to easily track all the marketing content published by competitors across numerous paid, social, and content channels.
“Consumers are drowning in content and it is critical that companies create messages that cut through the clutter,” said TrackMaven CEO Allen Gannett. “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 amount of data companies are now collecting has grown exponentially over the last decade,” said NEA General Partner Harry Weller. “Marketing teams have found great success using TrackMaven’s platform as they are able to see how audiences engage with content and use the data to make real-time changes to their marketing strategies.”
The Washington, D.C.-based company has 40 full-time employees and will use the additional capital to rapidly grow their product development, sales, marketing, and customer success teams. The funding will also allow TrackMaven to continue to enhance their data-driven insights, develop new platform features, and integrate with other marketing technologies.
The software-as-a-service provider is used by hundreds of top brands including Martha Stewart Living, NPR, the National Basketball Association (NBA), Marketo, CSC, and Eddie Bauer.
About TrackMaven
TrackMaven provides competitive intelligence for digital marketers across a wide variety of industries. TrackMaven is used by marketers to identify marketing opportunities, optimize content distribution, and track real-time progress. Founded in 2012, the company is headquartered in Washington, DC. To learn more, visit www.TrackMaven.com.
About New Enterprise Associates
New Enterprise Associates, Inc. (NEA) is a leading venture capital firm focused on helping entrepreneurs build transformational businesses across multiple stages, sectors, and geographies. With approximately $13 billion in committed capital, NEA invests in information technology, healthcare, and energy technology companies at all stages in a company’s lifecycle, from seed stage through IPO. The firm’s long track record of successful investing includes more than 175 portfolio company IPOs and more than 300 acquisitions. In the U.S., NEA has offices in Menlo Park, CA; New York, NY; Chicago, IL; and the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. In addition, New Enterprise Associates (India) Pvt. Ltd. has offices in Bangalore and Mumbai, India, and New Enterprise Associates (Beijing), Ltd. has offices in Beijing and Shanghai, China. For additional information, visit www.nea.com.
About Silicon Valley Bank
Silicon Valley Bank (www.svb.com) is the premier bank for technology, life science, cleantech, venture capital, private equity, and premium wine businesses. SVB provides industry knowledge and connections, financing, treasury management, corporate investment, and international banking services to its clients worldwide through 28 U.S. offices and six international operations. Silicon Valley Bank is the California bank subsidiary and the commercial banking operation of SVB Financial Group. Banking services are provided by Silicon Valley Bank, a member of the FDIC and the Federal Reserve System. SVB Financial Group is also a member of the Federal Reserve System.