DemandJump’s recent announcement of a $6 million Series A round is more fuel for the company and its product that have been undergoing tremendous growth in a short amount of time. The oversubscribed raise will help prepare DemandJump to bring on more tech talent and innovate in new ways.

With growing headcount and capital, DemandJump is clearly on a path to disrupt their marketplace. “We’ve discovered that, without DemandJump, most marketers only have visibility into about 20% of their digital ecosystem. They’re realizing this lack of visibility is a massive problem, and looking to us as the solution,” DemandJump CEO Christopher Day said.

DemandJump’s main product, Traffic Cloud, is a customer acquisition platform that assists marketers in finding the right people to whom they should target their campaigns. The software platform does this by identifying qualified web traffic that converts into revenue for DemandJump’s customers.

Christopher DayDemandJump CEO

Customer acquisition is normally considered part of the sales cycle, but marketers are increasingly showing up at the table when it comes to increasing that sales pipeline. “Marketing is now being held accountable for revenue,” Christopher said. “We provide a solution that offers the highest propensity to turn someone into a customer.”

After pitching the company and product over the past few years, Christopher found that he was speaking to an audience that understood the challenges of acquiring customers through marketing channels, but their way of solving the problem was a world behind the DemandJump platform.  “Marketers have historically had to set up campaigns on how they think,” he said. “But billions of people are searching for a product, and the way each person searches is different. Our product unwinds all of the searches and combinations to uncover the most powerful way to find that product.”

Christopher decided to pivot from their original focus on pitching Traffic Cloud as an artificial intelligence-enabled marketing platform to focusing on customer acquisition, which has already proven to be more effective. Though AI is still a critical component of what they do, Traffic Cloud produces results that enable marketers to create the strongest customer acquisition channels they can, and that became core to the product’s messaging. While their solution has always found success in the marketplace, following the activation of the full suite of their data gathering tools in August 2017, their increased precision on what their solution can do has helped transform their customers’ returns and doubled DemandJump’s own revenue, too.

DemandJump has attracted the interest of new investors who wanted to contribute to the company’s future growth and development. Led by Bill Godfrey and Bob Davoli, investors saw a lot of value in supporting the company’s growth through this Series A raise, and DemandJump worked hard to cultivate relationships for many months that led directly to fundraising success. Christopher believes two major factors in their company’s pitch led to their oversubscription: DemandJump’s team and how they use mathematics in their product. “The investors believe in the team,” he said. “They understand the marketing tech landscape. They know there’s a lot of meat on the bone, opportunities to apply real math through AI to solve huge problems that still exist today.”

Among investors like Flyover Capital, Cultivation Capital, 4G Ventures and Hyde Park Venture Partners was Revolution’s Rise of the Rest, who had seen the company’s pitch in October 2017. At that time, DemandJump had been a finalist for an initial round of competitive funding, but afterward, the company had continued conversations with the organization. Through that relationship, DemandJump was able to sign them on to this latest funding round. It served as further indication that Indiana is developing as the “nation’s nucleus,” and that tech companies are well-positioned to capitalize on increased interest in areas outside of the coasts. “It’s four to five times more cost effective to build a business in the middle corridor than it is on either coast,” Christopher said. “Venture capitalists are realizing that there are a ton of talented people and companies throughout the country.”

DemandJump has secured several Mira Awards since they were founded: Best New Startup and Innovation of the Year in 2016, and Best New Tech Product in 2017. These awards have led to some interesting developments in DemandJump’s path toward national recognition alongside enticing more investors and customers. They were selected as one of three finalists for the National Retail Federation’s Digital Commerce Startup of the Year, competing against 170 other entrants nationwide to receive this distinction for companies who are advancing technology in the retail industry. Christopher pitched his company’s product on stage in front of the entire NRF Digital Commerce Executive Council, which is made up of judges who are CMOs and CDOs of world-class branding companies.

“That stuff doesn’t happen without the Mira Awards,” Christopher said. “Winning statewide awards in the nation’s nucleus put us in the position to get investors and customers excited. It serves as a testament to the people: the team and the willingness to, in a productive way, argue and think differently.”

Those people who contribute to DemandJump’s success will be growing in number thanks to this latest capital raise. Christopher says the company plans to invest heavily in sales, marketing and engineers who will enable further product innovation. The company’s new CRO and director of customer success will begin by the end of April. With more strong leadership at the helm, DemandJump plans to use the next 24 months to increase their workforce beyond 40 employees, quadrupling their sales team, activating their customer service capabilities and expanding the engineering teams to examine and productize more of the breakthroughs they’ve uncovered in their work.

“You get the right people and get them in a room and create a process to do interesting things, it’s hard not to be successful,” Christopher said. “If you hire great people, they’ll attract other great people.”