Marketing automation startup Blueshift raises $8M from Storm Ventures, Nexus

San Francisco-based Blueshift Labs Inc, a Big Data-powered marketing solutions firm, has raised $8 million (Rs 53.2 crore) in a Series A round of funding led by Storm Ventures.

Existing investor Nexus Venture Partners also participated in the round, Blueshift said in a statement on Tuesday.

The company, which has customers in India, said the funds will be used for marketing and sales operations as well as product development.

"Blueshift has leveraged the very latest innovations in big data and machine learning. We think this is the future of all marketing automation," said Sharma, managing partner at Storm Ventures, who will join the company's board as part of the transaction.

Storm Ventures is a California-based venture capital firm focused on SaaS, mobile and cloud enterprise startups. It has about $500 million under management. The firm mostly backs startups at their early stage.

Blueshift was founded in May 2014 by Vijay Chittoor, Manyam Mallela and Mehul Shah, all former employees at Kosmix, a US-based social media data analytics firm that was acquired by Walmart.

Chittoor, also the CEO of Blueshift, told Techcircle.in via email, that marketers are increasingly realising the value of personalised communication across all channels of marketing, but find it hard to use Big Data and machine-learning tools. Blueshift aims to make it easy for marketers to use Big Data in building deeper customer relationships, he said.

Blueshift offers multi-channel predictive marketing automation that enables e-commerce marketers to convert visitors into repeat buyers and increase activation and retention rates. Blueshift helps marketers create behaviourally targeted campaigns across multiple channels including email, display and mobile push notifications.

In November 2014, Blueshift raised $2.6 million in its seed round of funding, led by New Enterprise Associates and Nexus Venture Partners.

In September last year, Nexus Venture Partners participated in the Series A funding round of Infoworks.io Inc, a San Jose-headquartered automated Big Data management startup with engineering operations in Bangalore.