Collaborative marketing platform Evocalize announced today that it has raised a $12 million Series A funding round. It says it plans to use the money to expand into new industries and invest in its technology. Currently, Evolcalize has a strong focus on the real estate industry.
The round is led by Move Inc., which is the company that operates the Realtor.com website. Other investors include Second Century Ventures and Habanero Ventures.
The press release announcement said this about how the funding will be deployed.
“This new investment will enable Evocalize to deepen its market-leading automation and machine learning capabilities to advance digital marketing performance for local businesses, add new channels to reach users everywhere they spend time online, and to expand into new industries to empower local and national-to-local marketers with new powerful, push-button-simple tools.”
Attacking New Industries
Of course, we wanted to know a bit more about the investment. So we caught up with Evocalize CEO Matthew Marx to dig into this a bit more.
Marx told us Evocalize plans to “double down” on real estate. But he also sees opportunities to apply what the company has achieved in the real estate sector to other industries. Many of the industries he cites are adjacent to real estate.
“There are a number of industries beyond real estate that have local and national-to-local needs, including mortgage, insurance, multi-family housing, senior living, financial services, restaurants, and travel,” Marx said. “All of these industries stand to gain significantly from the adoption of collaborative marketing technology.”
Marx took over as Evocalize’s CEO in 2016 after spending two years as the company’s chief product officer. Before Evocalize, Marx was director of media products at Bazaarvoice.
Evocalize’s collaborative marketing platform is premised on the insight that most organizations lack access to the full toolset that would allow them to achieve optimal results with digital marketing campaigns. And these days this means campaigns on Facebook and Google. They can create more effective campaigns if they join forces with partners via the CMP. Evocalize argues that organizations can have more marketing success through sharing data, best practices, content, messaging, and more.
A Deeper Relationship?
We also were curious if this is a step toward Move Inc. and Evocalize getting even closer. Perhaps with an eventual acquisition? he didn’t address this directly. But he did say the two organizations are working on some cool things.
“We have some interesting new things we’re working on together with Move that will benefit all of our clients across industries and their users,” Marx told us.
“The home is the center of people’s worlds, and in the work-from-home COVID-19 era, that’s more true today than ever before. The home transaction is the largest transaction that happens in our economy, spurring changes in everything from your lender to your child’s daycare provider and your new favorite restaurant. We’re excited to be able to share some more details about these new initiatives later this year.”
“We’re always keeping our eyes and ears open for the best way to add additional value and functionality to our solutions to equip our clients and end-users with even more powerful, effective, and easy-to-use digital marketing programs,” Marx told us.
That sounds like a definite “maybe”.
