I’m very pleased to announce today that Act-On has secured $42 million in new venture financing. Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV) led the round, with existing investors Norwest Venture Partners, Trinity Ventures, US Venture Partners, and Voyager Capital also participating.
Palo Alto-based TCV is one of the largest providers of growth capital to premier technology companies, and has significant experience investing in late-stage, high-growth companies. With over 50 initial public offerings and several billion-dollar companies in its investment history, including ExactTarget in email marketing, Facebook in social media infrastructure, and Splunk in big data management. TCV also has invested in such companies as Netflix, Expedia.com, and Orbitz.com’s parent, Travelport Ltd. Act-On stands to benefit from TCV’s domain expertise and experience in building category-leading stand-alone companies.
The timing is excellent. Our category is one of the fastest growing in business software, increasing 60 percent annually and expected to reach $1.2 billion in 2014 according to Raab Associates Inc. Act-On itself grew at almost twice the rate of the market in 2013, and we expect this rate of growth to continue. We serve over 2,000 customers now, but there are at least 200,000 companies in North America alone that are in our sweet spot: the small and mid-size businesses and departments of large enterprises, across all industry verticals. We’re also expanding internationally, through our presence in the UK and India. Act-On will use the new capital to accelerate the business on all fronts, including new product development, sales expansion, and brand recognition.
There’s no surprise in our growth. Act-On entered the market relatively late, as a deliberate move. Courtesy of the experience the founding team had with Responsys (which was purchased by Oracle in late 2013 for $1.5 billion) we understood email marketing and how it needed to integrate with emerging marketing tools and social channels. We had trusted relationships with forward-looking marketers. We did the research to understand what those marketers really wanted in an automation platform, and we also learned what they found superfluous. We then built a platform to meet their needs, and launched slowly, testing and re-testing our assumptions along the way.
It’s paid off.
We built a marketing automation platform that has earned kudos for its ease of use coupled with a broad palette of capabilities that marketers deploy through the entire customer lifecycle, from lead generation through advocacy. We know, because our customers tell us and tell the world, that we help marketers and their companies achieve their business objectives.
Along with the trust and confidence of our customers, Act-On has earned high approval ratings from industry analysts: We were named a leader in the Q1 2014 Forrester Wave™ report on lead-to-revenue management platform vendors, and received the Frost & Sullivan 2014 Entrepreneurial Company of the Year award. In 2013, Act-On was selected by Forbes as one of America’s Most Promising Companies, chosen by Inc. Magazine for its Inc. 500 List of Fastest Growing Companies, and named to the Deloitte Technology Fast 500™ list.
The prime directive – for me, and for Act-On’s talented, dedicated staff – remains, as always, to provide the technology and services that help marketing and sales teams to succeed. Your growth is our strongest signal of success. Thank you for trusting us.
Read the press release here.