Cloud Campaign a social media management platform for marketing agencies, announced it closed a $1.5 million seed funding round Friday. Active Capital, a San Antonio-based seed venture firm for business-to-business (B2B) software as a service (SaaS) companies, led the round. Also investing were Colorado-based Access Venture Partners, AdEspresso founder Armando Biondi, Datalogix chief operations officer Eric Kirby, and former Google vice president of marketing Scott Epstein.
Ross Gray and Ryan Born founded the company in 2017. Cloud Campaign has nine employees and is based in Portland, Oregon, with a second office opening in Boulder, Colorado, in the coming months. They previously received $20,000 in pre-seed funding.
Social media has become an essential element in marketing campaigns. However, implementing a successful social media strategy can be labor-intensive, as it involves many repeatable steps required on a daily basis. Many marketing agencies resort to a collection of commercially available applications to get the job done. However, Hootsuite and other consumer tools are not designed for marketing agencies and freelance marketers juggling multiple clients.
The startup offers marketing agencies an integrated platform of tools to manage multiple client social media accounts more efficiently. Pricing ranges from $49 per month for individual users up to $199 for agencies, in the same range as competitors like Sendible and AgoraPulse that also offer individual plans at $49.
“Marketing agencies, while a quickly growing market segment, are still underserved and are often forced to use consumer tools or build their own amalgamation of products to suit their needs,” stated Cloud Campaign co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO), Ryan Born.
What makes Cloud Campaign stand out in this market segment is how its social media content scheduling and reporting are in one integrated platform. Agencies can quickly generate metrics on social media campaigns to show clients how their marketing budget breaks down to the cost per engagement, cost per exposure, and even cost per follower. A combined overview displaying social media traffic from all platforms reduces the time marketing teams spend on creating reports manually for clients. Artificial intelligence-powered algorithms power big data analytics built into the platform’s dashboard.
“Cloud Campaign is building the tools to help agencies be more competitive and successful in today’s dynamic environment,” Active Capital founder and CEO Pat Matthews said. “They were growing really fast, and once I understood their strategy to be the operating system for agencies, I was super intrigued.”
Active Capital is a venture capital firm designed to lead seed rounds for B2B SaaS companies based outside of Silicon Valley. Headquartered in San Antonio, Texas, the venture firm seeks out SaaS startups that show promise of growing into an enterprise company.
The venture firm has had a busy week. Cohley, a SaaS startup with a platform that helps top brands and agencies generate and measure content, announced Wednesday a $1.5 million funding led by San Francisco-based Right Side Capital, which included investment from Active Capital. Founded in 2016, the company is profitable with over 200 customers, an annual recurring revenue rate of 375 percent year-over-year in 2019, and a projected growth rate of 500 percent in 2020, Cohley co-founder and CEO Tom Logan wrote in a company release.
“With the rise of social networks, multi-variate testing, and the transition to highly personalized marketing, brands and agencies need more content than ever,” Matthews said about Cohley. “Cloud Campaign and Cohley fit our thesis very well: B2B SaaS, capital-efficient, but growing very fast. [That presents] big market opportunities.”
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