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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowEmarsys AG, the European marketing-software firm that established its U.S. headquarters in Indianapolis in July, said it recently raised $33 million in venture capital to turbocharge its international expansion.
San Francisco-based Vector Capital made the investment, marking the first time Emarsys has received funding from a private equity firm.
Sean Brady, the president of Indianapolis-based Emarsys North America Inc., said the company will primarily use the capital to bolster its workforce, enhance its software product and aggressively add U.S. and Latin American customers.
"I think it's fantastic for our organization," said Brady, a former ExactTarget executive, in an interview Monday. "As we looked at our expansion across the globe, we really wanted to have a partner that understood the U.S. market and could help us hit the ground running."
Founded in 2000, Vienna-based Emarsys provides businesses, particularly retailers, a cloud-based dashboard for running and analyzing marketing efforts. Among other things, the platform compiles customer data, automates personalized marketing campaigns and displays results.
Company officials declined to disclose Emarsys' valuation.
While the fresh capital won't be spent exclusively in Indianapolis, a good chunk will be used to fuel growth at its U.S. headquarters. The company plans to hire more than 167 Hoosiers by the end of 2020.
It also pledged to use about $3.2 million to lease, renovate and equip about 15,000 square feet of space in Market Tower downtown.
Today, the company employs 34 people in offices in Indianapolis, San Francisco and Austin, Texas, Brady said. Twenty-five of those employees are in Indianapolis.
Worldwide, it has more than 500 employees in about 15 offices, including in London, Beijing and Paris.
Emarsys said it set up shop in Indianapolis partly because of the technology talent here. Its move comes as software firms are striving to deliver increasingly sophisticated tools to help enterprises make their consumer marketing messages as relevant and as timely as possible.
Brady said Emarsys hones in on helping retailers extract more spending from existing customers instead of simply acquiring new customers.
Industry analysts have broadly referred to the field as contextual marketing, and other local companies in the space include the Salesforce Marketing Cloud and SmarterHQ.
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