This article was published on October 18, 2012

BloomReach raises $25 million from NEA to help marketers better attract & acquire customers


BloomReach raises $25 million from NEA to help marketers better attract & acquire customers

Having come from an agency background many years ago, one of the things that I’ve had to manage were search engine optimization campaigns. Basically we needed to make sure that our pages were optimized for specific keywords and their deviations. For businesses, there needs to be an easier way to manage your search programs so that it saves you time and that your customers find exactly what they want.

BloomReach is just one of those companies striving to help make life easier for everyone and today, the company is announcing that it has raised $25 million for its Series C funding round, led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA). Existing investors like Lightspeed Venture Partners and Bain Capital have all returned in this third round to help push the company’s funding totals to $41 million since its creation three and a half years ago.

What this service does is integrate with a company’s website to generate search optimized pages that can easily be indexed and displayed for the users. How this works is that the service will use a variety of sources like whether you’ve been a previous customer, what sites have you been to prior, what was your last purchase, and many others — it utilizes hundreds of data sources that it curated between the database it custom-built along with what it found crawling the web.

Over 7,000 small businesses and 80 large enterprise companies rely on BloomReach’s product and expertise to help figuring out what customers are looking for and to drive top-line revenue. An example of how BloomReach could work is in this example from CEO Raj De Datta:

Imagine if Macy’s has two webpages: one for red sweaters and another for striped sweaters. You go to Google and search for “red striped sweaters” and it will take a look at Macys.com and not return any results because there aren’t any pages.

With BloomReach, the algorithm will know what keyword derivates one could search for (in this case “red striped sweaters”) and will automatically create the page. So now when you search on Google, a Macys.com page will be for “red striped sweaters”.

This type of service has benefitted multiple businesses and offers time-saving measures as Target.com veteran and Managing Partner Ovative/group Dale Nitschke explains: “marketers can focus their resources on content development and creative strategy, letting machines maximize the reach and impact of their businesses’ content.”

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BloomReach, on average, has generated a 92% lift year on year in non-branded, natural search traffic and has improved paid search profitability by up to 50% by making the user experience as relevant as possible.

With the new fund it’s providing to the company, NEA’s general partner will be joining the board of directors. The money will go forwards expanding in three key vectors: internationally — allowing the company to grow outside of the United States; exploring new verticals like financial, healthcare companies, and others; and moving towards solutions that focus on search beyond the web.

Image credit: Oli Scarff/Getty Images

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