SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Brandcast, a cloud-based company offering the first code-free website platform for the world’s leading brands, today announced it closed a $13.9 million Series A financing round led by Shasta Ventures with participation from existing investor Marc Benioff and new investor Correlation Ventures. To date, Brandcast has raised a total of $19.4 million to support the company’s accelerating growth in the enterprise sector.
Brandcast enables non-technical users to prototype highly customized websites in minutes or hours and publish them with a click of a mouse—code-free and mobile-ready. Using Brandcast, innovative brands like Lowe’s, Colliers, and New York Fashion Week have put content creators back in charge of the design, deployment, and updating of their websites.
“We are disrupting the legacy platforms that make enterprise websites tedious to design, expensive to deploy, and dependent on developers for execution,” said Richard Yanowitch, Brandcast CEO. “This new influx of capital will allow us to respond to the high levels of demand we’re seeing from Fortune 1000 companies and help fuel our mission to consumerize websites for enterprise. We continue to scale our world-class engineering, design, and customer-facing functions to help the world’s leading brands drive engagement across the entire marketing lifecycle.”
Website creation continues to grow at incredible pace: Forrester reports that enterprises have an average of 268 different customer-facing websites (some have more than 1,000).1 At the same time, organizations are increasingly frustrated with legacy website software which was invented long before the explosion of social media, mobile, and the cloud.
“Brandcast’s early performance indicators and first wave of high-profile customers signal a huge market opportunity in one of the last legacy-driven enterprise functions,” said Doug Pepper, Managing Director at Shasta Ventures. “Designed from the ground up to serve the needs of designers and marketers, Brandcast’s SaaS platform is uniquely positioned to take on older, developer-constrained platforms like WordPress and Adobe Experience Manager. Today’s investment reflects our confidence in Brandcast’s powerful, code-free value proposition for forward-leaning enterprises.”
“We thought we would need developer resources to accomplish our objectives for the new allen + roth site,” said Molly Stauning, Brand Manager at Lowe’s. “Instead, we were delighted to discover Brandcast’s easy-to-use design platform with website hosting services and third party integrations—a complete solution that our marketing team can use to create and manage microsites. Brandcast truly has a differentiated offering, and our beautiful, style-forward site on Brandcast has been the envy of many other groups here at Lowe’s!”
Dan Lynch, Brandcast co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, said Brandcast is “as much of a design company as it is a technology company,” with principles and elements of design “baked right into the technology.” Marketers and designers get easy-to-use tools to share stories faster and deploy their exact designs sans developers—a truly groundbreaking concept for fast-paced enterprise teams that are challenged to respond to consumers’ exponential demand for fresh, rich content.
“It’s amazing that nobody else has championed the 97% of non-technical professionals involved in website content creation for enterprises and agencies,” said Hayes Metzger, Brandcast co-founder. “We are thrilled to have new visionary investors on board who also see this huge market opportunity we’re serving.”
1 Forrester Research, “The State of Digital Experience Delivery, 2015,” April 2015
About Brandcast
Founded in 2012 by Dan Lynch and Hayes Metzger at the intersection of design and web technology, Brandcast is leading the code-free website revolution by enabling creative freedom and marketing control in the enterprise. The Brandcast platform gives marketers and designers the ability to create and publish a large volume of websites with unprecedented ease, speed, scale, and control. To learn more about Brandcast, visit https://brandcast.com and follow @brandcastapp on Twitter.
To view a Brandcast-powered company presentation, click here.
