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B2B marketing company Metadata.io raises $6.5M
Metadata.io announced today that it has raised $6.5 million in Series A funding.
It’s been more than four years since I wrote about the startup’s $2 million seed funding. At the time, co-founder and CEO Gil Allouche described the product as helping business-to-business marketers target their ads as people who resemble their existing sales leads.
Since then, the company has launched its product in general availability, and Allouche told me yesterday that it’s become “really the middleware for the sales and marketing stack.”
“It doesn’t just … give you insights, it skips the human as the bottleneck of execution for marketing [operations],” Allouche said, adding that this makes marketing teams more efficient while also eliminating much of the drudgery. “If you’re a Don Draper who’s really good at creative or content, you should spend your time on that and not in an Excel spreadsheet.”
At the same time, ad targeting remains a key part of the company’s capabilities. For example, its new product MetaMatch allows advertisers to build and target custom audiences on Facebook, LinkedIn and programmatic display.
Allouche also said that demand has increased “quite significantly” since the beginning of the pandemic. That’s counter to larger digital ad trends, but he noted that B2B companies still need to reach customers, and many of the old tools — like in-person events — are now off the table.
Gil Allouche and the Metadata leadership team
In addition, he said that Metadata’s proprietary database of 1.4 billion customer profiles have given it an additional advantage in the face of privacy regulation and ad-tracking restrictions.
The platform has been used by companies including Zoom, Drift, Pendo, Udacity, and Vonage.
The new funding was led by Resolute Ventures, with participation from Greycroft, York IE, Stormbreakers, Eloqua founder Mark Organ, Segment founder Ilya Volodarsky and others.
“Metadata isn’t another marketing technology,” Organ said in a statement. “From the origin of the company transforming marketing operations by eliminating tedious manual work, to today, creating a category that transcends demand gen, it is enabling the autonomous marketer to be a reality. It is the marketer that’s needed for the future.”
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Cloudtenna raises $2.5M, launches mobile search app to find content across cloud services
Finding somewhere in a Slack conversation, or stored in Box, Dropbox, Google Docs or Office 365, that one document you want to attach to an email is a huge challenge as we find ourselves spreading our content across a variety of cloud services. It’s one challenge that Cloudtenna has been trying to solve, and today the company announced a $2.5 million funding round along with the release of a new mobile search tool.
The funding comes from a variety of unnamed investors, along with Blazar Ventures, and brings the total raised to $6.5 million, according to the company.
Cloudtenna co-founder Aaron Ganek says that by using AI and document metadata, his company can find content wherever it lives. “What we’re really focused on is helping companies bring order to file chaos. Files are scattered everywhere across the cloud, and we have developed AI-powered applications that help users find files, no matter where they’re stored,” he said.
The company introduced a desktop search application in 2018 and today it’s announcing a mobile search tool called Workspace to go with it. Ganek says they built this app from the ground up to take advantage of the mobile context.
“Today, we’re bringing the search technology to smartphones and tablets. And just to be clear, this is not just a mobile version of our desktop product, but a complete case study in how people collaborate on the go,” he said.
Image Credit: Cloudtenna
The AI component helps find files wherever they are based on your user history, who you tend to collaborate with and so forth. That helps the tool find the files that are most relevant to you, regardless of where they happen to be stored.
He says that raising money during a pandemic was certainly interesting, but the company has seen an uptick in usage due to the general increase in SaaS usage during this time, and investors saw that too, he said.
The company launched in 2016 and currently has nine employees, but Ganek said there aren’t any plans to expand on that number at this time, or at least any number he was ready to discuss.
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