| To: Glenn Petersen who wrote (5644) | 9/8/2011 11:50:50 AM | | From: stockman_scott | | | | HookLogic has raised $9.5 million in its first institutional financing from Bain Capital Ventures. The company, which says it has been profitable for the past six years, sells software designed to help e-commerce retailers to incorporate relevant and profitable paid media programs within their online, mobile and social stores. The financing will be used to expand its business across the retail, travel and automotive sectors, the company said.
PRESS RELEASE
September 8th, 2011 -- HookLogic, the leader in e-commerce media, today announced a $9.5 million round of financing from Bain Capital Ventures. It is the first institutional investment in HookLogic after six years of profitable growth. The funding will be used to further develop its unique Software-as-a-Service (Saas) platform that has underpinned the company’s record growth in the first half of 2011, and aggressively expand its business across the retail, travel and automotive sectors in North America and Europe.
HookLogic provides technology and services that enable e-commerce retailers to incorporate relevant and profitable paid media programs within their online, mobile, and social stores. It simultaneously provides brands and their media agencies with deep funnel marketing opportunities that reach shoppers in the buying mode at the critical moment between consideration and purchase. HookLogic currently works with several industry leaders including Overstock.com and Expedia. In June of this year, it was selected to Red Herring’s Top 100 North America list, which in past years included Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, Skype, Salesforce.com, YouTube and eBay.
“We believe e-commerce media is a truly disruptive concept for both retailers and advertisers,” says Deepak Sindwani, Principal at Bain Capital Ventures. “We have followed this growing space for years and evaluated several of the players. We believe HookLogic is uniquely positioned to capitalize on this opportunity through its industry-leading technology and media services.”
According to HookLogic CEO Jonathan Opdyke, Bain Capital Ventures is an ideal strategic partner to help the company accelerate its growth plans due to its deep roots and expertise in the retail and technology sectors.
“We see this as a validation of our business model from one of the smartest, most demanding investors in the world, and an opportunity to truly change the economics behind an industry,” says Opdyke. “Today, few retailers fully monetize their digital assets despite clear demand from advertisers for point-of-sale marketing. This growth investment will help open the doors to one of the most valuable touch points in digital marketing — the moment of truth when shoppers become buyers.”
About HookLogic:
HookLogic powers e-commerce media, a revolutionary way for brands and shoppers to connect in and around the e-commerce environment. For retailers, HookLogic drives a new, high-profit, media-based revenue stream. For marketers, HookLogic creates unprecedented opportunities to influence in-market shoppers at key decision points. Headquartered in New York City, the company has offices in Ann Arbor, MI, Atlanta, GA and Manchester, UK. Clients include Expedia, Overstock.com, Meijer, Shoebuy.com and Wayfair. Learn more at www.hooklogic.com.
About Bain Capital Ventures:
Bain Capital Ventures is the venture arm within Bain Capital, which has approximately $66 billion of assets under management worldwide. The firm’s history of investing in venture-stage companies dates back to 1984 with over 125 venture investments since inception including DoubleClick, Gartner Group, LinkedIn, m-Qube, ProfitLogic, Shopping.com, Staples, Taleo and vAuto. Bain Capital Ventures manages $1.5 billion of assets, has over 70 active portfolio companies, and has offices in Boston, New York, and Palo Alto. The firm has helped steer many ideas to success by working in partnership with management teams, pairing talented and passionate entrepreneurs with industry experts, opening doors to customers, and collaborating on sound long-term strategies. |
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| To: Glenn Petersen who wrote (5644) | 9/8/2011 2:52:35 PM | | From: stockman_scott | | | | Platfora Secures $5.7 Million in Series A Funding Led by Andreessen Horowitz for Big Data Business Intelligence
Sept. 8, 2011 – PALO ALTO, Calif. – Platfora (www.platfora.com), a startup focused on generating effortless insights from big data, today announced that it raised $5.7 million in Series A funding to expand and accelerate development of its intuitive and richly interactive BI and analytics platform for data stored in Hadoop.
Andreessen Horowitz led the round and General Partner Scott Weiss is joining the board. In-Q-Tel, the independent strategic investment firm that identifies innovative technology solutions to support the missions of the U.S. intelligence community, also participated in the funding round.
“Businesses are increasingly looking to Hadoop, rather than traditional databases, to store their fast-growing datasets,” said Ben Werther, founder and CEO of Platfora. “We transform Hadoop from promising back-end technology into an effortless, interactive and beautiful way for business users to get rapid insight and answers from any sized dataset, even those with petabytes of information.”
Hadoop is the industry’s leading path to a low cost and massively scalable data infrastructure, but it lacks the interactivity and sophisticated reporting capabilities needed by business users. Platfora works with existing Hadoop clusters, including Cloudera, MapR, and Amazon EMR, among others, and automatically turns the questions of business users into dimensional and predictive dashboards, reports and insights. The company’s innovative server architecture enables sub-second report delivery, analytics overlay, and drilldown performance.
“There is a dramatic shift occurring in the enterprise software market right now and we believe Platfora is uniquely positioned to help businesses easily process large quantities of data,” said Scott Weiss, general partner with Andreessen Horowitz. “Hadoop was a big first step for the industry, but Platfora will enable businesses to tap into its full potential.”
Platfora helps customers explore, interact with, and derive insight from arbitrarily large data sets, while eliminating the need for traditional data warehouses, ETL tools and the legacy BI products of the past. The company is focused on delivering a beautiful, intuitive and dynamic user interface, and serving the needs of diverse industries including web, advertising, finance, telecommunications, logistics and federal intelligence.
“The big data challenge extends across both the government and commercial markets and we see opportunities for applying Platfora’s innovative approach in both,” said T.J. Rylander, partner on IQT’s Investments team. “The advances in the usability of scalable data infrastructure technology that Platfora is developing would have broad applicability for our customers in the U.S. Intelligence Community.”
About Platfora
Platfora is a software company based in Palo Alto, Calif., building a revolutionary BI and analytics platform that democratizes and simplifies use of big data and Hadoop. The company was founded by Ben Werther, former product head of Greenplum, an analytical database company acquired by EMC. Platfora is assembling a superb team of data and distributed systems architects/engineers, UI and UX developers, and data scientists. For more information, visit www.platfora.com.
About Andreessen Horowitz
Andreessen Horowitz is a stage-agnostic venture capital firm that provides seed, venture and growth-stage funding to the best new technology companies. Founded by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, Andreessen Horowitz helps entrepreneurs become successful CEOs and build important and enduring companies. Its general partners are Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, John O’Farrell, Scott Weiss, Jeff Jordan and Peter Levine, all widely recognized experts in the creation, scaling and operation of high growth technology companies. The firm has $1.2 billion under management across two funds. Among its 60 investments are Facebook, Foursquare, Groupon, Skype, Twitter and Zynga. The firm was established in June 2009 and is located in Menlo Park, California. For more information, visit www.a16z.com.
About In-Q-Tel
In-Q-Tel is the not-for-profit, strategic investment firm that works to identify, adapt, and deliver innovative technology solutions to support the missions of the U.S. Intelligence Community. Launched in 1999 as a private, independent organization, IQT’s mission is to identify and partner with companies developing cutting-edge technologies that serve the national security interests of the United States. For more information, visit www.iqt.org.
For More Information:
Kate McEwan
The OutCast Agency
kate@theoutcastagency.com
Ben Werther Bio
Ben is Founder and CEO of Platfora, a new startup focused on building a revolutionary BI and analytics platform that democratizes and simplifies use of big data and Hadoop. Ben previously served as VP of Products at DataStax, the commercial leader in Apache Cassandra, and, before that, as Director of Product Management at EMC’s Data Computing Products Division (formerly Greenplum Software). At Greenplum, Ben led product management for the company, and drove product strategy, prioritization and product definition. Prior to Greenplum, Ben was at Microsoft where he was responsible for planning of the ‘post-Longhorn’ Windows Server platform and strategic planning for Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualization platform. Ben was a CS PhD candidate at Stanford University, and holds an MS from Stanford University and a B.Comp(Hons) from Monash University (Australia). |
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