Blueshift Raises $30M to Revolutionize Marketing with AI

The Evolution of Marketing Clouds and the Rise of Unified Platforms

The “marketing cloud” – a bundled suite of marketing tools offered by major technology firms like Salesforce, Oracle, and Adobe – has become a prevalent solution for businesses aiming to enhance their digital marketing efforts and drive growth.

However, some industry observers contend that the term “cloud,” in the singular form, may be inaccurate. Often, these tools lack seamless integration and function more as disparate software components.

Blueshift's Approach to an Integrated Marketing Stack

Today, Blueshift, a startup focused on delivering a complete marketing stack built from the ground up, incorporating both traditional marketing data and customer experience insights, has announced a new funding round. This highlights the potential for developing more effective alternatives.

The company has secured $30 million in Series C funding. Co-founder and CEO Vijay Chittoor stated that these funds will be allocated to expanding into new markets – currently focused on the U.S. and Europe – and further developing its technology.

“Our product already provides a unified data format, enabling ingestion from various sources and redistribution to applications. We now aim to extend data distribution to a wider range of last-mile applications,” Chittoor explained. “A key initiative is to evolve beyond being solely an application and become a comprehensive platform.”

Customer Base and Growth

Blueshift’s clientele includes prominent companies such as LendingTree, Discovery Inc., Udacity, BBC, and Groupon. The company has experienced substantial revenue growth, increasing by 858% over the past three years, although specific revenue figures and valuation remain undisclosed.

Fort Ross Ventures led the funding round, with significant participation from Avatar Growth Capital. Existing investors, including Softbank Ventures Asia, Storm Ventures, Conductive Ventures, and Nexus Venture Partners, also contributed.

Origins and Addressing Industry Challenges

The concept behind Blueshift originated from Chittoor’s experiences at Groupon – which acquired his previous venture, Mertado, a social e-commerce company – and his earlier tenure at Walmart Labs, following Walmart’s acquisition of Kosmix, a semantic search company where Chittoor was a founding member.

“The challenges we are addressing today were directly observed during our time at Groupon and Walmart,” Chittoor noted. “The increasingly connected customer journey generates exponentially more data, and engagement occurs across numerous touchpoints. Tracking this data has become increasingly complex with traditional, channel-centric applications.”

Blueshift’s solution, according to Chittoor, centers on “unifying the data and making decisions at the customer level.”

Fragmented Customer Experience vs. Unified Marketing View

While the modern customer experience is often fragmented – with potential interactions across physical locations, social media, email, web searches, marketplaces, and apps – the marketing perspective should be unified.

SmartHub: A Customer Data Platform

The company offers a customer data platform (CDP) marketed as “SmartHub.” This platform is designed for ease of use by non-technical users, while still offering customization options for engineers. Users can integrate diverse data feeds from multiple sources, which Blueshift then processes and organizes for structured viewing.

This processed data can then be utilized to drive marketing campaigns across various channels. Chittoor emphasized the growing focus on first-party data to power these campaigns, rather than relying on third-party data sources – a significant industry trend.

Investment Perspective

“Our mission is to support category-leading companies poised for market dominance. Blueshift clearly distinguishes itself as a leader in the enterprise CDP space,” stated Ratan Singh of Fort Ross Ventures. “We are excited to partner with the Blueshift team as they accelerate the adoption of their SmartHub CDP platform.” Singh will be joining Blueshift’s board of directors as part of this funding round.