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We all know based on M&A activity that marketing automation is big. Now, Marketo has filed for an initial public offering valued at $75 million, according to an SEC filing.
The news broke just hours after data visualization fan favorite Tableau filed for a $150 million IPO of its own. The public offerings are seen as validation that companies that build business-to-business software are hot right now.
In November, San Mateo, Calif.-based Marketo raised $50 million in venture funding from Battery Ventures, bringing total funding to date for the 7-year-old company. And category leader Hubspot raked in $35 million in mezzanine funding to bring its total trove to $100 million.
In December, Oracle dropped $871 million to buy Eloqua; a month later InfusionSoft, which focuses on marketing automation for smaller companies, netted $54 million in new funding.
Marketing automation vendors aim to help customers find and qualify sales leads — gleaning attractive prospects from sources including online ads but also from Facebook(s fb), Twitter and other sources. The goal is to prequalify these prospects and convert them into actual sales.
Many companies now use an inefficient hodgepodge of processes and products for this purpose. Given that chief marketing officers are now seen as having huge influence on IT purchases, vendors are chasing that constituency.
Marketo’s ticker symbol will be “MKTO” and shares will trade on NASDAQ. VentureBeat has more on the offering.
So what is the bigger story here…What does Marketo’s IPO filing mean for the industry moving forward? Here is an insightful blog post by Act-On Software CMO, Atri Chatterjee, where he provides his thoughts on the relevance of Marketo’s IPO:
http://blog.act-on.com/2013/04/sowhats-the-relevance-of-the-marketo-ipo/
I think Barb is a bit confused. Marketo is raising $75MM, not valued at $75MM.
Good company and technology, but their deliverability compared to similar systems is abysmal (YMMV).
Given all of the activity in the big players around a common customer platform, it will be interesting to see if Marketo grows into other areas — or is snapped up by one of the big guys. Oracle’s Customer Experience initiative, Adobe’s Marketing Cloud, Salesforce’s Customer Company — all could use a great addition like Marketo. (Wrote about this at http://goo.gl/6Xtrr )
Congrats, Marketo!
–Chris.
http://selligy.com