Salesforce Ventures, the corporate venturing arm of enterprise software producer Salesforce, participated in a $12m round for US-based marketing software producer Autopilot yesterday.
Blackbird Ventures led the round, which also featured fellow venture capital firms Rembrandt Venture Partners and Southern Cross Venture Partners.
Founded in 2012, Autopilot has developed visual marketing software that integrates with existing enterprise platforms such as Salesforce, Twilio and Slack in order to automate the entire marketing process, or journey as the company refers to it, from end to end.
The round was announced alongside the launch of Insights, which Autopilot describes as a fitness tracker for journey marketers, enabling them to set goals and track their progress towards achieving their aims.
Mike Sharkey, co-founder and CEO of Autopilot, said: “We live in an experience-based world where good marketing does not feel like marketing at all, yet companies today still view their customers as a name and an email in a spreadsheet.
“With the launch of Insights and continued support from our investors, we are helping marketers move beyond batch and blast email to create remarkable multi-channel experiences across the entire customer journey.”
Autopilot has now raised $32m altogether, including $7m in a 2015 round backed by Salesforce Ventures, Blackbird Ventures, Rembrandt Venture Partners, Southern Cross Venture Partners, Garnett Ventures, Stage One Capital and private investor Tim Draper.