Salsify Announces $8 Million Series A to Enable All Companies to Create and Share Compelling, Accurate, Up-to-date Product Content
Boston, MA (PRWEB) September 12, 2013 -- Salsify, Inc., the company developing a first-of-its-kind global network for product content management, today announced that it has received $8 million in Series A funding from Matrix Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners.
Salsify was created to give all businesses the ability to create, maintain and distribute consistent product content necessary for e-commerce such as images, specifications, attributes, and relationships. Using a cloud-based infrastructure, Salsify’s global network enables the people closest to product content – often outside of IT – to keep it current and instantly share updates across the supply chain. Critically, these users can create customized content streams for every downstream retailer, including automatically resized images and customized sets of required properties. By contrast, most existing solutions adhere to a centralized command-and-control system where it becomes difficult for any one team to make changes to the content for which they are responsible, and even harder to have different versions of content for conflicting use cases.
“Companies with big enough budgets to even start thinking about addressing product content management typically spend six-to-seven figures per year on an enterprise software solution that cannot keep up with the pace of change in the marketplace,” said Jason Purcell, co-founder and CEO of Salsify. “The vast majority of companies either can’t afford or do not have the IT capacity to implement these traditional enterprise solutions, so they’re left cobbling together data from PDFs, spreadsheets, and email for every single product they manufacture or sell. We’re taking a very different, decentralized approach that makes managing product content exponentially easier and faster and, for the first time, collaborative across the supply chain, so that anyone who sells online can benefit.”
“The product information bottleneck in e-commerce today is a big and growing problem,” said Michael Skok, partner at North Bridge Venture Partners and Salsify board member. “In fact year-on-year online spending grew at over 4x traditional retail sales in Q4 - the fastest since over five years ago according to the Department of Commerce. But without the right product content being compiled with all the rich media required by buyers, then distributed through the now multiple channels of B2B or B2C e-commerce and formatted for all the forms of delivery from web to mobile and beyond, commerce simply grinds to a halt. And keeping it up-to-date and available on demand is a distributed problem ideally suited to the cloud solution Salsify is delivering. But best of all this team is uniquely qualified to address this from their time at companies like Endeca and they have a vision to build an industry leading company that we’re honored to fund.”
“The Salsify team knows this space extremely well,” said David Skok, general partner at Matrix Partners and Salsify board member. “Their ability to use the cloud and apply a SaaS model to something as crucial for businesses as product content management is exciting because it has the capacity to transform e-commerce on the backend. We believe that transformation comes from the ability for manufacturers, distributors, and e-commerce vendors to collaborate seamlessly on product information. Salsify is a great example of where SaaS can provide automated systems across different companies.”
Salsify was founded by a team from IBM and Endeca with deep experience in e-commerce and the semantic web, where they saw firsthand the importance of accurate product content to commerce initiatives. At the same time, they recognized how the rise of cloud computing, the consumerization of IT, and decentralized collaboration popularized by services like GitHub and Yammer could fundamentally change product content management.
Salsify has already attracted a number of customers across diverse vertical markets, such as cosmetics, medical devices, and consumer electronics. The company continues to acquire customers every month, and the new funds will enable Salsify to grow its team to meet increasing demand for its services.
For more information on Salsify, please visit http://www.salsify.com. To gain additional insight into the investment and the story of how it was made please see Michael Skok’s blog post.
About Salsify:
Salsify provides a cloud-based product content management solution that makes it easy for manufacturers, distributors, and retailers to manage and exchange high-quality content that drives online results. The Boston-based company was founded in late 2012 by a team with decades of experience powering the top e-commerce sites in the world. To learn more, please visit http://www.salsify.com
About Matrix Partners:
Matrix Partners is a premier venture capital firm that has generated outstanding returns for more than three decades. By focusing on early-stage investments and emphasizing long-term relationships with entrepreneurs, the firm has delivered several of the industry's top performing funds of all time. Matrix Partners has offices in Cambridge and Waltham, MA; New York, NY; Palo Alto, CA; Mumbai, India; and Beijing and Shanghai, China. Matrix Partners has invested in several game-changing, industry-leading businesses such as Apple Computer, Aruba, HubSpot, JBoss, Netezza, Phone.com, Polyvore, Starent Networks, Tivoli Systems, Veritas, Zendesk, and Zong. To learn more about Matrix, please visit http://www.matrixpartners.com.
About North Bridge:
Established in 1994, North Bridge Venture Partners has funded more than 170 early-stage companies creating many billions in market value. Among those firms are Acquia, Actifio, Cascade Communications, Demandware, Starent Networks and Wellfleet Communications. The firm, with $3.2 billion in capital currently under management, is an active partner for early-stage entrepreneurs, providing seed-to-growth financing for innovative companies looking to disrupt big markets. North Bridge partners, many founders themselves, work with entrepreneurs to apply their expertise in the creation, operation and scaling of market-leaders. The firm has offices in Waltham, MA and Palo Alto, CA. To learn more about North Bridge go to http://www.nbvp.com.
Megan Maxwell, GMK Communications for Salsify, http://www.salsify.com, 650-810-6658, [email protected]
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