Blueshift Raises $30 Mn In Series C Round Co-led By Fort Ross Ventures And Avatar Growth Capital The company will use the funds to further accelerate its global growth, cementing its leadership position in the CDP space

San Francisco-based artificial intelligence (AI)-powered (CDP) customer data platform, on Wednesday, announced a $30 million Series C financing round, bringing the total amount raised to $65 million. This funding round was led by Fort Ross Ventures, along with Avatar Growth Capital.

Existing investors including Softbank Ventures Asia, Storm Ventures, Conductive Ventures, and Nexus Venture Partners also participated in the round.

Ratan Singh of Fort Ross Ventures will join the company's board of directors.

"Our mission is to back category-leading companies that are poised to dominate a market. Blueshift clearly stood out to us as the leader in the enterprise CDP space," said Ratan Singh, partner, Fort Ross Ventures, and board member, Blueshift. "We are thrilled to partner with the Blueshift team as they accelerate the adoption of their SmartHub CDP platform."

Marketing and customer experience (CX) are increasingly intertwined in today's connected world, and marketers are being tasked with understanding customers through the lens of CX data to craft personalized experiences. However, traditional marketing platforms focus only on marketing response data like clicks and are unable to leverage CX data from across the customer journey. The first generation of CDPs attempted to solve this challenge by focusing only on data integration, but lacked any intelligent decisioning, and was not built for marketers or CX professionals, a statement released by the company said.

"With the increased urgency towards digital transformation, we have seen an increased demand for a SmartHub CDP, that can not only unify silo-ed data but also unify silo-ed experiences," shared Vijay Chittoor, co-founder, and chief executive officer, Blueshift. "I am very pleased to welcome both Fort Ross Ventures and Avatar Growth Capital to the Blueshift family as they have tremendous experience with enterprise-focused scale-ups at our stage of rapidly accelerating growth."

The CDP platform claims to combines the data fidelity of a CDP with the intelligence needed for marketers to make real-time decisions. This enables marketers to not only unify 360-degree CX data "CDP', but also to make AI-powered decisions from large volumes of data "Smart', and distribute the decisioning to every touchpoint in the customer journey "Hub'.

The platform has been adopted by leading global brands including LendingTree, Discovery Inc., Udacity, and BBC among others, and has been shown to deliver 781 per cent return of investment (ROI), said a recent study conducted by Forrester Research.

"One of the biggest challenges in 1:1 marketing is the need to activate large volumes of data when you scale to millions of customers across multiple touch points. Unlike other platforms that struggle with handling increasing amounts of data, Blueshift becomes more powerful the more data you have in it," added Chris Kachel, senior director of customer experience, LendingTree. "This has allowed us to scale our personalization efforts and customer journeys across multiple apps on different channels, and the results have been tremendous"

The company is backed by leading venture capital investors, including Fort Ross Ventures, Avatar Growth Capital, SoftBank Ventures Asia, Storm Venture Partners, and Nexus Venture Partners.