Pursway Secures $7.2 Million in Funding from Battery Ventures and Globespan Capital Partners

Big data marketing analytics company Pursway has announced that it has closed a $7.2 million round of funding from Battery Ventures and Globespan Capital Partners. The new investment will be used to expand the company, and speed up product innovation to meet the increasing demand from marketers.

Pursway's software improves customer acquisition, cross-selling, and retention by creating a map of customer relationships based on customers' social presence and identifying relationships between buyers to empower marketers to better target customers with a demonstrated influence over others' purchasing decisions. The company currently has a database mapping the social relationships of more than 100 million U.S. consumers, according to TechCrunch.

"There's no question that big data and social influence have given marketers valuable insight into their target buyers, but translating that data into sales continues to be the Achilles heel," Scott Tobin, general partner at Battery Ventures, says. "Pursway takes a completely different approach, relying on transaction and interaction data, revealing previously invisible social connections that drive actual and measurable consumer behavior. As a result, the demand from major retailers, financial institutions, and telecom providers has been significant. We're confident that Pursway will continue to disrupt the way marketers use data to generate sales."

Pursway overlays its proprietary relationships database onto existing customer and prospect data to identify important relationships and uncover true influence relationships, according to a company statement. Pursway's Influence Value Order (PIVO) technology has the capability to identify people who tend to frequently influence the purchase of specific products or services in an online population. When combined with information garnered through traditional big data analytics, this influence data allows marketers to map relationships between prospects and customers in a database. This approach, according to Pursway, typically yields a return on marketing programs two to five times the initial investment.

"Marketers are constantly focused on improving campaign effectiveness—more data is great, but more impactful and easy-to-work-with insights are better," Steven Fuld, senior vice president of the Sony Card Marketing & Services Company at Sony Corporation of America, a Pursway client, says. "Pursway has shown the ability to efficiently give us a single view of customer and prospect data, analyzing true relationships between the people in our databases, and identifying real purchase influence."

According to Sony Card Marketing & Service Company, the company's prospecting campaigns were optimized based on information provided by Pursway's PIVO technology and results, as well as conversions, increased by 200 percent. "New campaigns with better targeted messages have [also] consistently brought new prospects on board and deepened our brand engagement with influencers," Fuld adds."

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