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Venture Capital News: Beckon Secures $10M in Funding

2014-04-19
SAN MATEO, CA, Leading provider of marketing analytics software, today announced that it has raised an $8 million round of Series A funding.
Beckon, the leading provider of marketing analytics software, today announced that it has raised an $8 million round of Series A funding, bringing the total raised to date to $10 million. August Capital, who led Beckon's $2 million Seed round, is now joined on the Beckon board by Canaan Partners.

The capital will be used to solidify Beckon's position as the leading innovator of marketing analytics software and to accelerate development of the Beckon platform. Built by and for marketers, Beckon solves the long-standing marketing 'Big Data' problem: delivering actionable marketing intelligence from unstructured spend and performance data across online and offline channels.

Brands including Converse, StubHub, Union Bank and Nokia use Beckon to input messy marketing data and get rich, cross-channel marketing dashboards and analytics. This allows them to quickly and easily get an integrated view of their marketing spend and performance across all channels, so that they can compare marketing investment options in a normalized way.

'Finance, Sales, HR, Operations - every business function has a system of record for its core data, providing visibility, insight and accountability,' said Ross Fubini of Canaan Partners. 'Marketing has long struggled for credibility at the C-levels because it's never had a marketing system of record - until now.'

'Marketing is incredibly complex, with new channels to reach consumers popping up all the time,' said Jennifer Zeszut, co-founder and CEO of Beckon. 'Marketers will always experiment - that's the name of the game. But a marketing team that is experimenting without a normalized way to gauge what it delivered at what cost is lighting dollar bills on fire. Marketing needs a platform that supports both experimentation and accountability, and that's Beckon.'

Beckon can pull in data from APIs and data warehouses, but users can also just cc: Beckon on all the reports that flood email inboxes today, including Excel spreadsheets, agency PDFs, email and social media reports, and PR firm PowerPoints. Even better, the SaaS platform requires no IT integration--it works seamlessly with whatever tools marketers already use.

'The most common practice for marketers to get insight from their data is to outsource analysis to IT, who use generic tools to extract marketing intelligence,' said Howard Hartenbaum of August Capital. 'But marketing data is so disparate, and marketing's intelligence needs so specific, that generic IT tools and approaches simply miss the mark. Beckon is a marketing-specific solution for which there has been longstanding pent-up demand. We look forward to our continued partnership with Beckon as they serve this seriously underserved market need.'

Beckon was founded by seasoned executives and entrepreneurs Jennifer Zeszut (CEO), who has been a senior marketing leader for many years, and Jochen Frey (CTO), who has worked in large-scale data processing systems for more than 20 years. Prior to Beckon, the two founded Scout Labs, which was later acquired by Lithium. Beckon's leadership team brings together decades of experience from companies like Razorfish, Aprimo, Scout Labs and Lithium.

To learn more, visit www.beckon.com or check out this video that shows life before and after Beckon .

About Beckon
Beckon is performance management for marketing in all its modern complexity. Only Beckon brings together data management, planning, reporting and analytics in a simple, powerful, SaaS platform built by marketers, for marketers. It aggregates, normalizes, categorizes and analyzes all the data that matters to marketers and gives the world's best brands insight into what's working best across it all.
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