06-26-2012

Our Investment In Jirafe

by Seth Levine

It’s a big day for funding announcements here at Foundry. This morning we announced that we led a $5M financing into Pantheon to help them extend their leadership in hosted Drupal (see that post here). Fast forward a few hours and we’re also today announcing our investment in ecommerce analytics and marketing platform, Jirafe.The Jirafe platform helps retailers make better use of their marketing budgets, drive better inventory and merchandizing decisions, and gain better insights into their online sales funnel. That’s a longer way of saying that Jirafe helps online retailers make more money, something that we believe every ecommerce vendor is looking to do!

For a long time we’ve been strong believers in the power of analytics (and have a history of investing in companies that have analytics as a significant part of their product offering). The first step to improving any process is to understand as thoroughly as possible what is working and what isn’t.  This is both especially true and especially challenging in ecommerce, where small changes can have major effects, but where tracking marketing to sales efficiencies can be extremely difficult. We believe that the intersection of commerce and marketing offers a huge opportunity for Jirafe to build a substantial business while helping online retailers grow more efficient and profitable (not to mention larger) through better understanding their commerce sales efficiency and making changes up and down this sales funnel to improve overall results.

Jirafe is led by Amit Shah and Scott Switzer, who both have a deep background in marketing, advertising and ecommerce (together they were part of the founding team of OpenX, and Amit ran sales and business development for ecommerce vendor Magento). We led this financing with FirstMark Capital with participation from OATV and FirstRound Capital. While we’ve been longtime friends with the team at FirstMark, this is our first investment together.

It’s an exciting time in the very quickly growing online commerce market. We’re looking forward to working with Amit, Scott and the rest of the team at Jirafe to help growth that market even faster and create a great business in the process.