B2C marketing automation Blueshift Labs raises $8 mn Series A funding

Blueshift Labs Inc, a B2C marketing automation vendor, has said that it has raised $8 million (around Rs 53.2 crore) in its Series A round of funding.

The funding was led by Storm Ventures. Existing investor Nexus Venture Partners also participated in the round. Anshu Sharma of Storm has joined the Blueshift board of directors, bringing to the company his years of experience in SaaS from his executive leadership role at industry leader Salesforce.com.

The company will use the capital to accelerate sales and marketing and to continue building out its proprietary Interaction Graph platform.

BlueShift was founded in 2013 by a team of data scientists and marketers previously at WalmartLabs and Groupon. The company's solution is used primarily by ecommerce companies.

The company was founded by former Kosmix employees Vijay Chittoor, Manyam Mallela and Mehul Shah. Blueshift offers multi-channel predictive marketing automation that enables e-commerce marketers to convert visitors into repeat buyers and increase activation& retention rates.

BlueShift had previously raised $2.6 million in seed funding from Nexus Venture Partners, which also participated in the new round; New Enterprise Associates; Tim Kopp, the former CMO of ExactTarget; and the founders of Kosmix, which was bought and turned into WalmartLabs.

"Storm Ventures has previously backed many of the leading companies in marketing technology and SaaS, and we are especially thrilled with the confidence they have placed in us as we enter our next phase of growth," said Vijay Chittoor, co-founder and CEO of Blueshift. "We are very glad to have Anshu join our board, where we can tap into his experience at Salesforce.com."

Anshu Sharma, partner at Storm Venture Partners, said: "Blueshift has built a unique segment of one marketing platform by leveraging the very latest innovations in big data and machine learning-built by a team of seasoned marketing practitioners. We think this is the future of all marketing automation."