In the online shopping age, it can be difficult for businesses to keep all of their product information updated and relevant to potential customers.
Boston-based startup Salsify has spent several years helping brands manage their product content across Amazon (NASDAQ: [[ticker:AMZN]]), Google (NASDAQ: [[ticker:GOOGL]]) ads, the websites of brick-and-mortar retailers, and other digital marketplaces. Salsify claims it has been gaining traction in the market, winning new customers this year such as Anheuser-Busch, Michelin, and Asics. Today, the company is getting another boost—a $43 million Series D funding round led by Greenspring Associates.
The investment brings Salsify’s venture capital haul to $98.1 million, the company said. Other investors in the latest round include earlier backers Matrix Partners, Venrock, Underscore VC, and North Bridge Venture Partners. Salsify last raised capital in early 2017, a $30 million Series C investment.
In an e-mailed statement, Salsify co-founder and CEO Jason Purcell declined to comment on the company’s financial results or potential exit plans. During the first half of 2018, Salsify spent 40 percent of its revenue on research and development, according to a press release. Now with deeper coffers, the 225-person company plans to invest more in its products, global expansion, and hiring.
“Salsify’s momentum meant the company did not currently need additional cash, but there was significant interest from new investors,” Purcell (pictured above) wrote in the e-mail. “With this supplementary capital, we can confidently accelerate our growth across more major global brands, which have extensive support and engineering needs, without straining internal resources.”
Purcell started Salsify with Rob Gonzalez and Jeremy Redburn in 2012 in a Boston basement. The trio previously worked together at Cambridge, MA-based Endeca, the enterprise search and e-commerce technology company acquired by Oracle (NYSE: [[ticker:ORCL]]) in 2011 for roughly $1 billion.
Purcell said one of the trends driving Salsify’s business is that “consumers are increasingly researching products online on places like Amazon, even if they buy them in [the] store later.”
“These brands need to worry where they are showing up in searches on Amazon, Walmart, and other retailers, if they want to be found by consumers at all,” Purcell continued. “Plus, keeping the content you see on the Amazon product page up-to-date with the current packaging, language that speaks to consumers, and all the while adapting to daily changes happening within retailer algorithms, is tremendously complex but critical to driving purchases.”
Salsify’s software helps brands “centralize” all of their product content and push it to their myriad retail and distribution partners in the format that their partners’ online systems require. Salsify also provides machine learning-enabled analytics tools that aim to identify changes to product information that might boost sales, Purcell said.
