Startups that make software for advertising and marketing remain appealing to investors, with the latest example coming from Integrate, which makes software that helps media buyers plan and manage campaigns across traditional and digital media channels.
Integrate announced today it has raised $7 million in a follow-on to the $11 million Series B round that the company raised in 2012. Foundry Group led the round, and Comcast Ventures and Liberty Global Ventures also invested.
Since Integrate was founded in 2010 it has raised a total of $22.25 million. It has about 120 employees spread between its headquarters in Scottsdale, AZ, and large offices in Denver, Boston, New York City, and San Francisco.
Integrate’s goal is to become the key tool media buyers use when they plan how to spend their brand’s or their agency’s ad budget, co-founder and president Jeremy Bloom said. Over time ad buyers have developed several ways to track and plan spending, including good old-fashioned spreadsheets, and Integrate wants to consolidate that activity into its product.
It also wants to give media buyers the data they need to plan more effective campaigns and to track their results, Bloom said.
“What Integrate is focused on is creating software at the highest level, so that brands can get away from using 16 different systems, and then try to correlate what their spend means in terms of performance, into a single software engine,” Bloom said.
“Pretty much in real time, we can say ‘out of your million dollars, you should really be spending it in these three buckets, with these publishers, with this creative,’” Bloom said.
Integrate’s AdHQ software can track the performance of Web-based and mobile campaigns, and it also can tell buyers how their print, television, or billboard campaigns are doing. Integrate works with marketing automation software like Marketo and Eloqua and customer relationship management software like Salesforce to provide end-to-end service, according to Bloom.
The money from the latest round will be used to support Integrate’s two big pushes over the next year, chief financial officer David Tomizuka said. The first is to further develop Integrate’s cloud-based system.
“We are making additional investments in our software platform to build it out further, add functionality, and increase the breadth of the capabilities it has to handle different types of marketing campaigns,” Tomizuka said.
The other is to increase its number of large clients like Microsoft, Dell, and Sony. Integrate has made inroads with large global brands over the past year, and it wants to keep the momentum going.
“It’s a strategic crossroads for us. We’ve made some significant progress over the past year in expanding our client base,” Tomizuka said.
