Account-based marketing company Engagio has raised $22 million in Series B funding, led by Norwest Venture Partners, with participation from FirstMark Capital and Storm Ventures. The latest financing will be used to scale its sales and marketing teams, accelerate product innovation and expand customer success in the fast-growing ABM category, according to founder and CEO Jon Miller.
Engagio, which raised a first round of funding in April 2015 at launch, was not actively looking for investors, Miller said. “We were not looking to raise money anytime soon. [Norwest] approached us proactively. They knew account-based marketing was hot, and they wanted to make a proactive bet on us and offered to invest.”
Lead investor Norwest Venture Partners studied the account-based marketing landscape and identified Engagio as an investment target. Sean Jacobsohn, Cloud VC and Partner at Norwest Venture Partners, said it was a combination of Miller’s reputation, the team he’s assembled, the Engagio Playmaker platform and the company’s plans that attracted him. “I’m excited about this team, the product and the vision,” Jacobsohn said. “I think Engagio has the long-term product vision.”
Jacobsohn added that he sees Miller, who also co-founded marketing automation company Marketo, as a “category creator.” Engagio has signed 50 customers since it launched in beta a little over a year ago.
“When you have that kind of success without a professional sales force, it tells me the market is ripe for the opportunity you’re going after,” Jacobsohn explained. Engagio customers include Apttus, Blue Jeans Network, Guidewire, InsightSquared, LiveRamp and VersionOne.
Engagio currently employs 22 people; the plan is to hire organically over the next two years across the company in engineering, marketing, sales and customer service roles, roughly doubling its size next year and then doubling again in 2018. Ray Carroll was appointed VP of Sales in July. He was previously Area VP of Sales at Marketo, where he spent seven years growing that business alongside Miller.
The Engagio platform is designed to help B2B companies form a target account strategy. It sits in the marketing stack on top of marketing automation platforms and Salesforce to give organizations an account-based view of customers and prospects — while helping orchestrate outbound interactions across sales and marketing. The platform enables companies to proactively reach out to land, and then expand the most valuable accounts.
Jacobsohn called ABM “a multibillion dollar market, at least as big as the marketing automation category, but it requires building products over time to get there. [Engagio is] building the next-generation marketing solution, and they’ve got good traction to start.”
“Account-based orchestration is just as big a problem as MA was,” Miller noted. He has spent the past year-plus and about a third of Engagio’s initial funding round pioneering his “Account Based Everything” model. He told Demand Gen Report that description is more accurate, since the model “brings sales and sales development into the equation.”
Miller also noted that it has taken less time to sign on the first 50 customers at Engagio compared with his experience at Marketo. “It took Marketo 1017 days, or two and three-quarter years, to get to 50 [customers], and it took us 10 months.”
He added that in the same timeframe Engagio has raised $32 million, Marketo raised $5 million.
