Tag management company Ensighten raises $15.5M

Money raised will be used for expansion and hiring

Leading tag management company Ensighten has closed a $15.5 million Series A, the company announced Wednesday.

The round was led by Volition Capital, with participation from Eastern Advisors and Floodgate Fund.

Ensighten’s tag management enables businesses to manage their websites more effectively by replace hundreds of lines of code per with a just single line, Ensighten CEO Josh Manion said in an interview.

The company’s technology is commonly embedded into websites, mobile apps and online video. Tags enable digital marketers to personalize the Web and gather information about our visits to websites, apps, videos and kiosks. 

The idea is to “fundamentally change how marketers interact with third party apps.” Ensighten’s tags streamline how marketers add, remove and modify these apps.

Manion says that Ensighten will use the money to accelerate the development of its product, and target general growth in sales and marketing, Manion says.

The company will also begin to hire new talent. While there are 20 current open position, the actual number of hires will depend on the combination of growth and how much of the market Ensighten can capture. Either way, the company will be aggressively hiring, Manion says.

In addition, the company plans to expand its operation. The company opened a London office in May 2012, and Manion says that the company hopes to eventually expand to the Middle East, Asia and South America, but that there are currently no concrete plans for those areas.

Manion, a former competitive chess player,g founded the Cupertino, California-based Ensighten in 2009. The company current serves over 750 billion tags a year to over 25,000 domains.

Ensighten’s clients include A&E Networks, LendingTree, Lenovo, Microsoft Stores, Monster, Sony, JCPenny, CapitalOne, American Express, Staples, Dell, State Farm, The Home Depot and Subaru.

Manion says that, while the market is growing very fast, but that Ensighten is outpacing the market. The company saw 400% more tags served between the first and second quarter of this year. It also doubled its number of employees is three months.

This should allow Ensighten to compete against the heavy hitters in tag management, such as Adobe and Google.

In addition to its tag management system, Ensighten also offers Ensighten Mobile, which allows real-time tag management for mobile apps; Ensighten Privacy, which enforces privacy standards for third-party data collection; and Ensighten Flash, which allows for web tracking analytics on media apps, such as YouTube and Flash.

Other tag management funding

Ensighten is the second tag management company to raise funds in the last few months. In July, Tealium, which helps marketers manage their website tags, raised $10.5 million in a Series B round of funding from Battery Ventures.

In August 2011, BrightTag, a marketing solutions provider for eCommerce and retail companies, announced a $5 million led by New World Ventures, with help from existing investors Tomorrow Ventures, EPIC Ventures, and I2A Ventures. 

In October 2011, TagMan secured another $5 million in its Series B round of funding from Greycoft Partners and iNovia Capital.