Big data startup BloomReach raises $25M Series C from NEA, existing investors

Big data marketing applications provider BloomReach , founded by two entrepreneurs of Indian descent, has raised $25 million in Series C funding from a consortium of investors led by US-based New Enterprise Associates (NEA).  Its existing investors, including Lightspeed Venture Partners and Bain Capital, also participated in the round.

The US-based company, set up by Harvard Business School alumnus Raj De Datta (CEO) and IIT-Delhi graduate Ashutosh Garg (CTO), plans to double its investment in sales and marketing and triple its R&D investment in the US and India. It also looks to expand big data applications to other platforms like mobile, social, and video.

BloomReach's big data applications connect marketers and consumers by interpreting web content and predicting online demand. Its technology, the Web Relevance Engine (WRE), captures, analyses and interprets billions of URLs and consumer interactions from across the web daily.

WRE uses that big data to adapt websites to capture existing demand and enhance consumer happiness, driving significant incremental revenues across a large customer base from the retail, travel and listings industries. The company bridges the digital discovery divide between consumers and marketers.

Established in 2009, Bloomreach has a Development Centre in Bangalore and is now planning to hire aggressively in India. "The future belongs to marketers that extract the maximum impact from the content they continuously create. India is an exciting market not only for its exceptional engineering talent, but also as an emerging e-commerce market and BloomReach is funded to aggressively invest in attracting the best talent and ultimately serving Indian marketers," said Raj De Datta, CEO and co-founder of BloomReach.

On average, BloomReach improves paid search profitability by up to 50 per cent by making the user experience as relevant as possible to consumers' intent.

"As of now, the US is our major market, where we have almost 100 customers, including Yahoo!. We are now looking at India as a key market too, as e-commerce is gaining momentum in the country," Vinodh Kumar, head, Bloomreach India, told TechCircle.

Kumar said that the India development centre is at the forefront of Big Data marketing innovation – creating new products for new channels and new markets.

The company is looking forward to investing in top talent and creating products that serve new geographies, including India. It expects the funding to enable it to grow its investment in the development centre by 500 per cent to accelerate its penetration of the burgeoning big data applications space.

"By empowering companies to channel the morass of Internet data into sales conversions and revenue growth, big data applications are the natural evolution of the Software as a Service (SaaS) model," said NEA general partner Scott Sandell.

"The next wave of SaaS leaders will combine the delivery-model benefits of cloud with web-scale data and machine-learning technologies. NEA's investment in BloomReach builds on our long history of partnering with disruptive SaaS companies like Salesforce.com, WebEx and Workday. In harnessing the potential of big data to revolutionize SaaS, BloomReach is an example of what's possible," Sandell added.

(Edited by Sanghamitra Mandal)