Genius lets salespeople watch a web visitor’s every move, raises $19M

February 4, 2008 | Matt Marshall | Comments |

genius.jpgGenius, which lets businesses track the behavior of customers visiting their Web site, has raised $19 million more in financing.

Genius lets a salesperson track who is visiting a page (see image at left), and jump in to have an IM chat with a customer who seems close to making a purchase on the site — to either help close the purchase or answer any questions the customer might have.

The financing round for the San Mateo, Calif. company was led by Accel Parters. Previous investors, Mohr Davidow Ventures, Emergence Capital and Walden International, also invested. The four-year-old company previously raised $15.1 million.

The company now says it has more than 400 corporate customers, up from 100 customers when we wrote about the company a year ago. It says it just closed a major account with British Telecom.

Chief executive David Thompson told us the company has focused on new features like email campaigns. In such a campaign, a salesperson can send out emails with links. When a potential customer clicks on a link and comes to the site, Genius lets the salesperson watch their clicking behavior.

Management teams at some companies (BT, for example) are now using the product to monitor how well email campaigns perform, how a web site is performing and how the salesforce is doing overall.

However, Genius will face more competition with its move into email. Competitors include Eloqua (coverage here), and for email, ExactTarget and Constant Contact.

The product is sold for $49 per user per month.

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Matt Marshall is editor and CEO of VentureBeat. Follow him on Twitter at @mmarshall, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • RONLG
    There have been products like this for some time now. Perhaps this has more to offer than the others I've seen.

    I have thought about this type of feature for our company but felt that our possible clients might get scared away by this type of interactivity. My reasoning behind it is that people not only shop online for better prices, but for privacy as well.

    The only way I would personally use this is if my members had an "opt-in" type of feature. I'm sure this will become a new trend in "customer service" on websites.
  • Very interesting space these guys are in. The CEO of Genius was the former founder of a top MLM company called Pharmanex - which I have covered. They are a NuSkin company so seeing him in this space is pretty interesting. These guys are definitely market leaders in their space and have raised a lot of money.
  • This boggles my mind that we can track an actual visitors movement realtime. I did not know that this was possible.

    I could see that it could be a privacy issue. I still got to go and check it out.

    Thanks. Wishing everyone an exseollent 2008