Capillary Technologies recently closed on $15.5 million in Series A venture capital funding, money that will be used to further develop the company’s cloud-based software solutions and to market the applications beyond the current customer base, according to Krishna Mehra, company co-founder and president, Americas.
“We’ve been growing rapidly in the last year and a half in the cloud space, providing an end-to-end CRM solution,” Mehra told Loyalty 360. “We want to continue to make our software smarter and easier to use.”
The company’s technology, a suite labeled as Intelligent Customer Engagement™ solutions, combines consumer enrollment, back-end analytics and campaign management to drive consumer engagement across every major channel, including in-store, mobile, e-mail and social media. Though the company considers its software intuitive and easy to use now, the goal is to continue to evolve it to minimize the technical expertise required by users, Mehra explained.
“Our SaaS model means that we get our customers live within weeks of engagement, then allow them to focus on making decisions about optimizing sales, rather than worrying about managing and maintaining a software suite” Mehra added. “Our message is simple: Our customers make money from using our solution within 2-3 months of starting to work with us. Not many other companies can promise that.”
The four-year-old company also plans to use some of the venture capital money to further expansion in the U.S. Some of the company’s U.S. customers are Pizza Hut, Puma, Robinson’s, Store21, Sunglass Hut and Nike. The company also plans to expand its presence in South East Asia, Europe, Middle East and Africa.
Worldwide, Capillary’s technology supports end-to-end customer engagement, clienteling, loyalty and social CRM solutions for more than 100 major brands across 10,000 stores—serving over 50 million consumers—in the United Kingdom, United States, South East Asia, Greater China, India, the Middle East and South Africa.
The venture financing was led by Sequoia Capital and Norwest Venture Partners (NVP). Existing investor Qualcomm Ventures also participated in the round. Mohan Kumar of NVP and Shailesh Lakhani of Sequoia have joined Capillary’s board of directors.
“This funding round validates our vision of enabling retailers to harness the power of the cloud, predictive analytics and new mobile and social channels to drive sales and profits through customer engagement,” said Aneesh Reddy, Capillary co-founder and CEO, in a prepared statement. “Both Sequoia and Norwest have amazing track records in helping to build significant companies—particularly in the big data and analytics sectors. We're looking forward to working with both firms as we invest further in our team and platform, expand aggressively into major global markets, and take our company to the next level.”
In announcing the funding, Promod Haque, managing partner, Norwest Venture Partners, said: “We have been extremely impressed with the significant number of customers that Capillary has signed up in a relatively short period of time. Capillary’s ability to marry ‘social’, ‘local’ and ‘mobile’ with robust behind-the scenes analytics is delivering tremendous value to a wide range of retailers across a number of categories. Capillary is helping these customers drive dramatic same-store sales increases — in some cases close to 10 percent — and has an enormous opportunity to expand its offerings globally in what is still a hugely untapped market.”
Lakhani added: “Capillary has demonstrated that it can scale up successfully and profitably by focusing on a segment that has been underserved by other more expensive and complex solutions.”