Lattice Engines latest funding further validates predictive sales analytics
- Summary:
- The role of predictive analytics in the sales cycle is gaining investor interest as its potential is evangelised.
Earlier this year we talked with InsideSales.com about the role of predictive analytics in the sales cycle, providing valuable data to the sales person on how, when and to whom to sell.
It’s a potentially enormous growth industry and one that investors are showing a lot of interest in, as seen yesterday when Lattice Engines which closed a $28 million Series D financing round.
This latest round was led by River Cities Capital Funds and Piper Jaffray Merchant Banking with other investors including Blue Cloud Ventures and existing Lattice investors Sequoia Capital and New Enterprise Associates (NEA).
With over $75 million raised to date, inevitably there will be speculation about a potential IPO. In a blog posting, CEO and co-founder Shashi Upadhyay talks in terms of achieving what he calls “escape velocity”. He says of the latest funding:
This capital will be used to expand our coverage of new use cases, additional verticals and new geographies. Our approach is not going to change, and we will continue to over-invest in customer success and provide measurable value.
He adds that the fact that the firm can pull in such funding is testament to the firm’s evangelism of predictive analytics role in sales:
In 2009, when we first figured out how to predict B2B purchases, most companies didn’t take our proposition very seriously. Since then, we focused on bringing predictive marketing and sales applications into the mainstream by adding new use cases, tapping into new buying signals, and integrating with the end-user workflows, regardless of which CRM or marketing automation application customers are using.
Key to this has been a policy of drilling down on use cases and winning customer advocates along the way:
Our early success has been driven by three major differences in approach, relative to others in the industry: laser focus on customer success, a complete vision for predictive solutions and an open approach to data.
We believe in over-investing in our customers to make sure predictive becomes a part of their everyday work life. We have incorporated every single use case into our products that we can. Whether you want to find new contacts, create new leads, match campaigns to contacts, prioritize leads, retain customers or cross-sell/up-sell to existing customers, the Lattice platform enables you to do just that.
And while we gather information from more than 150 million businesses ourselves, we have also partnered with industry leading data-providers like D&B, LexisNexis and Bombora (formerly Madison Logic) to provide specific data sets that combine to create the most comprehensive data cloud in the industry.
Lattice Engines is also rolling out international expansion via new in-country partnerships, such as Nordic digital marketing company Leadteq, an Oracle Gold Partner based in Sweden. A UK partner is set to be announced next week.
My take
A further vindication of what’s shaping up to be an interesting next evolutionary stage in predictive analytics. More to come.