Sydney-founded visual marketing software company Autopilot has announced the closing of a US$12 (AU$16) million funding round led by Blackbird Ventures, coming in hand with the launch of a new tool to help businesses track the performance of a customer’s journey against a set goal.
Bringing the startup’s total funding to $32 million, the round saw participation from Rembrandt Venture Partners, Salesforce Ventures, and Southern Cross Venture Partners.
The announcement follows a strong year of growth for Autopilot, with the business stating it nearly tripled its revenue in the last 12 months and reached over 2300 B2B and B2C customers across 90 countries, including Microsoft, Atlassian, Freshdesk, Crunchbase and Laser Clinics Australia.
Autopilot’s usage, which includes sending messages through the platform, now exceeds one billion events per month.
Beginning its journey in 2012, the business has offices in both Sydney and San Francisco, where it’s now based.
Autopilot’s visual marketing software helps automate the customer engagement process for businesses, with the platform integrating with CRM tools such as Slack, Twilio and Salesforce.
Autopilot cofounder Mike Sharkey said the launch of the new tool, Insights, will help the business expand its offering and empower both new and existing clients to engage their audiences.
“We live in an experience-based world where good marketing doesn’t feel like marketing at all, yet companies today still view their customers as a name and an email in a spreadsheet,” he said.
“With the launch of Insights and continued support from our investors, we’re helping marketers move beyond batch and blast email to create remarkable multi-channel experiences across the entire customer journey.”
Insight’s goal tracking features look to allow businesses to create a conversion goal with a few clicks.
Operating similar to a tracking app, businesses can quickly set up a goal, track a customer’s journey, and see what the best channels, metrics and messages are to help convert more revenue and engage a customer.
Monitoring conversions, Insight’s metrics capabilities have the ability to see who, and how quickly, a customer converts across a both online and offline channels, whether that be an EDM or a postcard.
The new tool is also able to display the best times and days to send an email based on results and identify which messages delivered across multiple channels are ‘winning’ in terms of engagement and conversions.
Discussing the benefits of Insight, Microsoft’s Global Head of Developer Business Tools, Chanse Arrington, said the tool helps the company market to a niche audience.
“Developers are a notoriously difficult group to market to. They require constant engagement and hyper-focused communications spanning long periods of time just to keep their attention,” he said.
“With Insights, it was dead easy to fire up and send targeted communications on the fly with very little effort. What’s more, executives love that I can show how core KPIs are tracking in real-time, without needing a data translator, right from my phone.”
Also in the customer engagement space, Sydney email marketing platform Vero announced yesterday the close of a $4 million Series A round yesterday led by Square Peg Capital.
Vero’s email-focused channel allows a user to pull in customer data, segment it, and in turn send email campaigns to specific categories. With the funding, the startup is looking to expand its product and marketing teams as it explores utilising data in other channels beyond email.
Image: Autopilot cofounders. Source: Business Insider.
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