SEO and content marketing company
BrightEdge has raised $42.8 million in Series D funding led by venture capital firm Insight Venture Partners, along with investments from Intel Capital, Battery Ventures, Altos Ventures and Illuminate Ventures. Originally an SEO company, BrightEdge says the newly raised funds will go toward building out their content marketing solutions.
BrightEdge’s existing S3 platform is a content marketing tool that allows users to evaluate how their content influences traffic, engagement and revenue. With customized dashboards, recommendations and analysis, the platform processes data to analyze content across channels in real-time.
BrightEdge VP of marketing and products Brad Mattick confirmed in an email that BrightEdge was planning to further invest in their content marketing solutions. “With our latest round of funding we are excited to continue to innovate in our technology to help our 6,000 brands and 600+ customers succeed in their search and content marketing initiatives,” said Mattick, “In addition we look forward to investing in further global expansion of our business.”
According to BrightEdge’s release announcing the funding, BrightEdge CEO Jim Yu claims:
Marketing has never been more data-driven or outcome-focused, and now, strategies backed by science and measurement are modern business essentials. We’ve built the first platform to bring sophisticated analysis to the consumer-facing part of marketing across all digital channels.
Yu’s statement reinforces the theory that the role of a CMO is transitioning into a more technology-focused position, a topic that was a central point of discussion following last week’s announcement that Salesforce.com was acquiring marketing services provider ExactTarget for $2.5 billion.
Insight Venture Partners principal Brad Twohig believes BrightEdge could become an integral marketing platform. Twohig was quoted in the announcement as saying, “Marketing today doesn’t have a go-to platform like IT, finance and HR… BrightEdge has the opportunity to become marketing’s must-have platform and we are excited to invest in the company and their success.”
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