The company gets support from Emergence Capital and previous investors
Genius.com on Wednesday announced a new round of funding while managing to to misspell their own name. Congratulations, Genius.com, you win the award for the most ironic press release of 2011 (that's right, nothing that comes after this will top it).
Now to get back to the matter at hand. The amount raised was not disclosed, but the round was led by Emergence Capital with help from existing investors Mohr Davidow Ventures, Accel Partners, and Deep Fork Capital. Founded in 2005, the company has raised $40.6 million in four previous funding rounds between 2006 and 2009.
The company offers an automated social marketing solution that allows businesses to connect with potential customers via a simple marketing and sales interface that eliminates the need for IT. The company's 500+ customers include Intuit, Salesforce, Rackspace, and more. In one case study, revenue was doubled while demand generation costs were cut by 75%. In another case study, Genius.com helped increase the number of closed deals by 40%.
The company recently shifted over to a freemium business model, allowing new customers to use the basic service for free with the option of upgrading to a paid service, and the decision has proven to be a success. In addition to the new funding, Genius.com also announced today that it is now profitable. Conversion rates from free accounts to paid accounts increased to 7% in the quarter ending January 30, 2011, up from 2% the previous quarter, and the company says that 20% of the new business revenue was driven directly by the new freemium model.
"Genius.com's unique instant-on technology and cost efficient business model have enabled the company to achieve impressive growth while also becoming cash-flow positive," noted Gordon Ritter, Managing Partner at Emergence Capital, in a statement. "This is a very rare combination of qualities in the SaaS space and marketing automation in particular. We are very bullish on the company's strategy to pursue new opportunities in the small business space."
Also announced today, co-founder and CEO David Thompson is stepping down to make way for Sam Weber, previously the COO, who will step in as CEO. Thompson will stay on as a strategic advisor.
Image source: Genius.com
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Mohr Davidow Ventures
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Mohr Davidow Ventures has been making venture capital investments for nearly 25 years and has $1.4 billion under management. It has backed dozens of companies that have either gone public or been acquired, including Broadcom, FormFactor, ONI Systems, Rambus and Vitesse Semiconductor.Genius.com, Inc.
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Genius.com is the leading provider of sales lead management and demand generation solutions that enable both marketing and sales users to quickly identify and connect with their best prospects, without IT.
Genius.com is a Sales 2.0 leader with over 500 corporate customers who use Genius solutions to automate email marketing and lead nurturing campaigns that deliver the most qualified leads directly to their frontline sales reps, so they can immediately follow-up on their best opportunities.
With Genius ProTM, Marketers can initiate powerful email marketing campaigns that deliver instant email open and website visit results directly to Sales, so Sales can quickly prioritize lead follow-up, calling on the most interested prospects first. Genius Pro lets Marketers use sophisticated personalization, including the ability to send on behalf of individual sales reps and post customized greetings on the website. Instant replays of website visits give frontline professionals insight into prospect interest so they can formulate the appropriate pitch for each prospect. Detailed reports let both sales and marketing easily evaluate success.
Genius EnterpriseTM is a full marketing automation solution that adds automated lead nurturing, real-time lead conversions, and lead scoring to Genius Pro's email marketing and lead management capabilities. The simple drag-and-drop interface makes it easy for marketers to set up powerful lead capture, prospect nurturing and lead scoring workflows to ensure a steady flow of communications to potential customers over time, until those prospects demonstrate readiness to engage with Sales.
Genius Enterprise is unique in enabling users to identify qualifying "conversion events", such as trial sign-ups or visits to a specific web page, that signal strong prospect interest. With Genius Enterprise, no matter what the state of any automated workflow, when a prospect "conversion event" occurs, Sales is immediately alerted and given access to the prospect's website visit history so they can follow up with the right prospects at the right time and with the right information.
