SAN CARLOS, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--ReadyPulse, has received $5 million in Series A Funding lead by California-based Venture Capital Firms, Walden Venture Capital and Rally Ventures. The funding, which follows earlier seed financings totaling $2 million from various early-stage investors, including Divergent Ventures, will be used for expansion into additional verticals and geographies. The goals for the funding include an increase in awareness for inspirational marketing among brand marketers, as well as focusing on mobile applications.
“"We’ve been carefully watching trends in social marketing for several years. ReadyPulse has proven through its customers' results that they can drive consumers to interact with brands on social networks and convert them into eCommerce sales consistently,” explained Matt Miller, Managing Director at Walden Venture Capital. “We felt this was the perfect time to invest in the future of social marketing.”
According to McKinsey in a Feb Article “Social media recommendations that nudge customers to increase their purchases are becoming a potent competitive asset.” With social photos from brand ambassadors being the highest quality and most effective endorsement, ReadyPulse and their customers, are poised for growth.
ReadyPulse’s digital marketing platform, Pulse Marketing Suite, uses patented technology to find a company’s most effective brand ambassadors on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, by analyzing the digital content produced by those individuals. Brand marketers then use the platform to recruit brand ambassadors, activate them in product launch campaigns for product reviews, and elevate their social content across digital channels, including making the content shoppable. All this is done with permission from the ambassadors and disclosures for the brands. Pulse Marketing Suite consists of (4) applications, Pulse Ambassadors, Pulse Stories, Pulse Analytics and LikeitWant.it. Currently Pulse Marketing Suite social displays are driving 1 Billion Brand Impressions a month.
“Fabletics brand ambassadors love Pulse Ambassadors! They enjoy participating in the campaigns, seeing each other’s content, and now they feel like they are a part of our brand team. Because of this their engagement frequency and quality have greatly increased. (for Fabletics) Running campaigns before was a huge hassle! I had too many tools in too many different platforms to execute just one campaign. Pulse Ambassadors streamlined this process for me, and made running ongoing campaigns a breeze.” - Alyssa Nimedez, Fabletics Influencer Relations
“As an Aspirational Brand, it’s difficult to find the right ambassadors to represent your brand. It’s difficult to find the best social content to display in your marketing, and permissions, disclosures, and notifications are also challenging. We set out to solve that. Simply put, we want to bring inspiration and confidence to every consumer who is making a researching or buying decision online” said Dennis O’Malley CEO and Co-Founder of ReadyPulse.
The marketing platform is positioned to dominate the field of consumer advocate marketing by creating powerful content from brand ambassadors to their communities. Their newly minted mission, “Inspirational Marketing for Aspirational Brands” rolls out with the recent announcement. Brand clients including, Adidas, Red Bull, Vineyard Vines, Reebok, The North Face, Twitter, Nickelodeon, Quiksilver, and Smith Optics.
“As an aspirational brand - we leverage ReadyPulse to provide inspirational images of and to our consumers - hopefully personalizing the images to meet their interest. Working with ReadyPulse over the last few years have enabled us to focus on high quality, authorized, product relevant images that are highly effective when display in context of commerce." - Adam Greene, Smith Optics Director of Marketing
About ReadyPulse:
ReadyPulse is changing the face of digital marketing by providing “Inspirational Marketing for Aspirational Brands.” The award winning and patented technology platform, Pulse Marketing Suite, is powering social ambassador programs and social content displays for over 100 of the world’s leading brands including, Nike, Red Bull, Twitter, The North Face, Adidas. ReadyPulse customers see significant increases in brand impressions, content engagement, and online revenue, often exceeding a 10X ROI for their investment. As a venture backed firm with locations in San Carlos and Oakland, CA and Redmond, WA ReadyPulse is hiring and expanding regionally. For more see www.readypulse.com
About Walden Venture Capital:
Walden Venture Capital targets Sprout Stage™ investments. We seek products or services with mass-market potential and powerful underlying technologies taking active supporting roles typically as first institutional investors. Our target sectors are digital media and cloud services for consumers and enterprise. We care deeply about Founders and Management and work diligently to help manifest their vision. Our portfolio includes leaders in music, mobile, internet media and breakthrough cloud services. For more see http://www.waldenvc.com
About RallyVentures:
Rally Ventures empowers entrepreneurs to go further faster. Rally invests exclusively in early-stage business technology companies, focusing on big data, cloud technologies, infrastructure software, mobility, IoT, SaaS, security, and storage. The Rally platform includes a dynamic network of nearly 100 Rally Tech Partners — visionaries, technologists, and executives who provide support and inspiration when needed to help growing companies break away from the pack and become tomorrow’s technology leaders. For more information, visit rallyventures.com.
