Lead generation company Marketo raises $8M

August 12, 2008 | Eric Eldon | Comments | |

Marketo, a company that helps automate the process of turning web users into customers, has gained more than 60 customers since it launched in March, including Thomson Reuters, Trimble, and Acteva. While the company isn’t disclosing revenue, it has raised a second round of $8 million from Storm Ventures, with InterWest Partners participating.

The company provides a sequence of services intended to take online traffic from a product site, an ad or other methods where user interest can be collected, and turn it into sales. Features include the ability to create landing pages, where a user can provide information to the company about the product they’re interested in. Marketo’s software also analyzes potential customers, based on information provided by the customers themselves, and other sources. It connects to other software within a company, like Salesforce (see screenshot below). Once sales have processed, or not, Marketo’s software shows which methods of marketing have proved most successful.

Competitors include Eloqua, Vtrenz and Market2Lead.

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About the Author, Eric Eldon

Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.

  • I think the statistics and figures are true as we do all know, lead generation nowadays is very lucrative. Great review you have here.
  • boyjah
    At $1,500 a month per basic license, you hope they know what they are doing. Good luck to them, wish they had a basic version at one-tenth the cost, very nice software.
  • NAV
    Good point, though I think $1,500 is not the price per user. I believe this includes several users. All things considered, it should replace several point solutions including email tool, a landing page creator, custom forms (or 3rd party outsourcing), and marketing analytics. I would think of it more as a "one stop shop" for the marketing department. Which makes $1,500 per month not to hard to swallow for a B2B marketing budget.
  • Thanks for thinking of Pontiflex but just to clarify, we are not in the sales leads or CRM business and thus do not consider ourselves competitive with Marketo (though congrats to them btw). Instead, Pontiflex is pioneering the marketing leads category. Also, we are focused on the b2c market whereas Marketo is going after b2b.

    Unlike traditional sales leads, marketing leads are brand-specific and unique to an advertiser's offer, and are never resold. Sales leads are typically closed via a phone call, whereas marketing leads are remarketed to via community sites, e-newsletters or member acquisition programs (rewards programs, newsletters, etc.)

    Pontiflex solves two fundamental problems for advertisers: 1) We deliver qualified leads from people who have expressed interest in their specific services/products, and 2) we let them know exactly where those leads come from. In addition, we provide automated campaign planning, setup, management and optimization through one centralized point of connection.

    For more details, check out our tour on our home page (www.pontiflex.com), or feel free to contact me directly at zephrin (at) pontiflex (dot) com. Or visit us at our New York headquarters.