The Blueshift team has very exciting news to share: we’ve raised a $30 million Series C financing round, led by Fort Ross Ventures, and Avatar Growth Capital, bringing the total amount raised to $65 million. Read the full press release here.
This is an exciting milestone for us, but the team at Blueshift is even more excited about the journey ahead. To understand the opportunity in front of us, and our customers, let me start by reflecting on the big shift underway in the world of marketing.
In the past, marketing has been disconnected from the Customer Experience (CX):
However, in the last few years, we have seen a dramatic shift in how marketers interact with consumers. In our “always-on” world, marketers are increasingly being asked to deliver experiential messages that were previously out of the scope of marketing channels and could only be delivered on the brand’s properties. In this new world, marketing is less about the channel, and more about understanding the customer, delivering “next-best” offers and content to each customer triggered at the perfect time in the customer’s lifecycle. In essence, today’s marketers are tasked with taking the experience to the customer.
To build a true understanding of customers, marketers need to go beyond traditional marketing data (like opens & clicks) and start tapping into “CX data”, of how customers have interacted with the brand’s experience channels. This might include real-time “events” from digital product interactions, transactional data from subscription & bookings systems, CRM data that captures interactions with sales agents or relationship managers, e-commerce & POS data, contact center interactions, and much more.
Legacy martech stacks, often built as a collection of channel-centric applications, can leverage marketing response data on different channels but are unable to tap into a deeper customer understanding through the lens of CX data. Essentially, these stacks are hollow; they lack a core customer foundation that connects and powers its channels and platforms around customers’ needs and intentions.
The first generation of CDPs focused on managing the data infrastructure, without changing the paradigm of how the customer experience was delivered. However, today’s marketers move beyond simply managing data and shift towards making their data work for them, at scale to deliver unified customer experiences that drive engagement, growth, and revenue. In short, they need a system that can truly help them make the shift to customer-centric decisioning seamlessly.
This necessitates a central “smart hub”, making decisions at a customer level, and relaying those decisions to every marketing channel and application. A smart hub serves to unite disconnected stacks around a shared, real-time customer understanding and provides a single point of control from which to base customer engagement decisions and guide execution across channels.
At Blueshift, we are excited about building the first true SmartHub CDP that provides:
At Blueshift, we have been on a mission to bringing the power of unified data and AI-based decisioning directly to marketers and making marketing more human. The events of the last year have further accelerated the trend of digital transformation and the connected customer experience. It has become even more important for every consumer brand to leverage omnichannel CX data to deliver the “next best experience” on marketing channels.
With this new funding round, I am excited to welcome both Fort Ross Ventures and Avatar Growth Capital to the Blueshift family. Not only do they have tremendous experience with growth-stage companies, but they are also strong believers in our mission.
A big thank you to all our customers, employees, partners, and investors. We couldn’t have made it so far without your support at every step. We are excited about the future and look forward to working with all of you in the next phase of our journey.
