Photo: Blueshift
San Francisco-based Blueshift is an AI-powered company that is known for helping consumer brands intelligently scale their customer engagement. The company’s Customer Data Activation Platform uses patented AI technology to unlock the value of customer data and it enables marketers to orchestrate individualized customer journeys across all owned and paid channels.
Recently, Blueshift announced it has raised $15 million in Series B funding led by SoftBank Ventures Asia. Previous investors Storm Ventures and Nexus Venture Partners also participated in this round. Including this round of funding, Blueshift has raised a total of $30 million so far. With this funding round, Blueshift is going to accelerate the growth of its Customer Data Activation Platform and build an ecosystem under its newly released app framework.
And the company also announced that Josh Francia — former VP of Marketing at LendingTree — has joined the company as Chief Growth Officer. While working as the VP of Marketing at LendingTree, Francia said he experienced what it was like to be a Blueshift customer:
“I personally researched thirty solutions before selecting Blueshift and completely struck gold. Their technology platform coupled with their authentic and deeply knowledgeable support team was and still is a rare combination in the SaaS MarTech landscape,” Francia explained. “I witnessed first-hand the step-change power of this cutting-edge platform and wanted to help bring that knowledge to others. The speed and efficiency with which Blueshift’s platform can impact decision-making is incredible, and I’m excited to be a part of this passionate and dedicated team that wants to transform the marketing landscape.”
In terms of accolades, Gartner recently named Blueshift as a Cool Vendor for AI in Marketing. This validates Blueshift’s capabilities in autonomous campaign decisioning.
“At Blueshift, our mission is to put AI in the hands of every marketer so they can transform their customer data into intelligent engagement on every channel,” said Blueshift co-founder and CEO Vijay Chittoor. “I am very pleased to welcome both SoftBank Ventures Asia and Josh to the Blueshift family. With this latest round of financing and outstanding new addition to our leadership team, we are poised to accelerate our growth and deliver the power of AI to even more brands through our Customer Data Activation Platform.”
Founded by Chittoor, CTO Mehul Shah, and head of AI Manyam Mallela, Blueshift’s platform is used by consumer marketers in diverse industries that are ranging from media & publishing, travel, retail, personal finance, etc. And in today’s always-on world, marketers are increasingly facing the challenges that involve managing massive amounts of customer data to intelligently make millions of 1:1 marketing decisions in real-time on multiple channels. And legacy marketing cloud solutions are built for batch-and-blast around email as the only channel. But Blueshift’s AI can unlock the power of the data by helping marketers automate intelligent decisions around the right audience, the right content, the right time, and the right channel.
“Marketers need a system that was built from the ground up with AI to deal with increasing amounts of customer data, and the proliferation of channels,” added Storm Ventures managing director Tae Hea Nahm. “Savvy digital marketers are starting to realize that AI Marketing requires a fundamentally different architecture. Like the early transition to SaaS and now to AI, incumbents will have a very hard time re-architecting their platform.”
And Blueshift’s platform essentially unifies historical data and real-time streams from multiple data sources and places it into a single customer view. This empowers marketers to scale intelligently and timely engagement on “people-addressable” channels such as email, paid media, websites, SMS, direct mail, mobile apps, chat, voice, etc. The brands that have adopted Blueshift’s new approach of using AI to activate customer data have seen a 3X lift in revenue.
