Blueshift Raises $15M Series-B Investment
We have some exciting news to share today! We raised a $15 million Series-B round led by SoftBank Ventures Asia. SoftBank deeply believes in AI’s ability to transform how we live, work and play, and we’re thrilled to partner with them. We have a long way to go in our mission to put AI in the hands of every marketer, but we have some concrete plans on how to get there, fueled by this new funding.
The Paradigm Shift in Customer Engagement
We live in an exciting time to be a consumer marketer. Today’s always-on customer is leaving behind large amounts of dynamic data about their intents and interests. At the same time, as more and more digital channels emerge, and more of them become “people-addressable”, brands have more avenues to put this data to work and intelligently engage with every customer as a segment-of-one.
Adapting to this always-on world requires a paradigm shift in marketing. Brands and marketers need to make the shift from channel-centric approaches to a truly customer-centric one, intelligently orchestrating customer engagement across every touchpoint.
Marketing cloud solutions, built 20 or more years ago for a single-channel world with largely static data, have proven to be insufficient for engaging today’s always-on customer. Customer Data Infrastructure companies have emerged to solve some of the growing pains around data, helping technology teams manage new forms of data. However, simply “managing” the data is not enough, and brands need to make the shift from towards putting the data to work on every channel, driving intelligent customer engagement.
The Shift So Far: AI in the Hands of Marketers
In this first phase of our journey, we are proud to have worked with cutting edge marketers, who have embraced the power of AI to unlock their customer data intelligently on every channel. Blueshift has helped marketers scale their storytelling and personalization, and drive revenue and ROI in the process. Using Blueshift’s AI-Powered Cross-Channel Journeys, Predictive Audience Syndications, and Live Personalization, marketers have been able to transform their customer engagement on email, SMS, mobile push notifications, websites and paid media channels like Facebook Custom Audiences and Google Customer Match.
In short, marketers using Blueshift’s AI have made the shift from being button-pushers to becoming strategic and creative brand storytellers, scaling their stories to millions of customers and creating AI-Powered Brands in the process.
The Next Shift: AI in Every Customer Facing Application, Everywhere
As we enter the next phase of our growth, we’re excited to extend the power of Blueshift’s AI to every customer-facing application. When we started Blueshift, we knew that customer engagement would be multi-channel, but even we couldn’t have imagined that banks would be engaging their customers over chatbots, or that TV advertising would start becoming “people-addressable” so quickly. Our newly announced app framework and Customer Data Activation Platform (CDAP) will help brands make every customer engagement application, including proprietary in-house applications, smarter with Blueshift’s AI.
We have been very fortunate to have a global base of customers from our early days. With the new funding, we will continue to invest in our global presence to support our customers everywhere. In addition to our San Francisco headquarters, Blueshift will be expanding in North Carolina, UK and India.
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.
