PE HUB: Seattle-Based IDInteract Launches with $700K in Funding

Connie Loizos | PE HUB | December 11, 2012 - IDInteract, a new, Seattle-based marketing analytics startup, has raised $700,000 from undisclosed funding sources. The company is being led by CEO Matthew Standish, a former chief information architect at T-Mobile. PRESS RELEASE: IDInteract, Inc., an innovator of products that empower enterprise marketers to identify and interact with highly qualified individuals and prospect clusters, today announced the launch of its company with $700,000 in initial investor funding. The company will be led by CEO and Chief Architect Matthew Standish, a veteran mobile and IT executive whose experience includes serving as Chief Information Architect at T-Mobile and as practice director of 4G IP Platforms for the US and Western Europe at AT&T Mobile. Standish developed the concept for IDInteract’s Demand Exchange(TM) technology after personally experiencing the pain of implementing traditional marketing, Business Intelligence, and CRM systems which were expensive, complex and often took upwards of 18 months to onboard. These systems also lacked multi-channel views of customer behaviors linked to demand and were solely focused on providing 30-60-90 day reports. Despite having the budget to implement nearly any CRM solution available, Standish often found these systems lacking when it came to delivering actionable information about customers to internal constituents like sales and marketing. Tools focused exclusively on social media also fell significantly short, providing reports on things like brand sentiment but failing to contextualize or bring social data to life in a meaningful and relevant way.

“After years developing IT platforms that solve business problems, I consistently heard about the wonders of ‘Big Data’ yet struggled to find any value in it using the tools that were available to me,” said Standish. “Enterprise marketers wax philosophical about the potential of big data to positively influence customer lifetime value, loyalty and customer retention, but they fail to understand the economics of how to influence the demand curve. Instead, they rely on pushing supply via channels like email and paid search results. Big data has the potential to change all that, but without a way to aggregate and analyze all the data, marketers are left in the dark with no way to understand and immediately act on real-time customer demand signals. Demand-based customer engagements are non-intrusive and ensure that consumer privacy is respected, while creating a mutually beneficial relationship for both parties. That’s really the soul of IDInteract — changing the direction of supply-based marketing to demand-based interaction.”

The launch of IDInteract coincides with the announcement of the company’s Demand Exchange product. Unlike complex CRM systems or narrow social media “widgets” focused on pushing supply out to the market, Demand Exchange aggregates structured and unstructured data from multiple sources and automatically abstracts that data into easy-to-use 360-degree graphic representations to identify real-time customer demand. This demand-focused approach allows enterprise digital marketers to effectively manage real-time market demand curves for their brands, products, and services including demand monetization by delivering targeted real-time offers. Standish is joined by Scott Frank who will oversee Marketing and Operations, Brian Leonard who is in charge of Design and User Experience, and John Helmon who will head up Customer Delivery and Platform Operations. Frank brings 27 years of product marketing experience, having served in senior roles at Microsoft, IBM and IDG. Leonard brings deep expertise in designing and developing products and services in the retail and technology industries, including household brands such as Red Bull, Budweiser and Bridgestone. Helmon brings 18 years of experience to IDInteract, primarily from his program management and solution deployment roles at Microsoft. In addition to its senior management team, several prominent members of the venture capital and technology communities are advising the company. They include Silicon Valley influencer Punit Chiniwalla, Director at Singtel Innov8 Ventures, and Lee Paries, VP of Sales at Teradata Aster, a big data analytics solution company. Link to Article:http://www.pehub.com/177041/seattle-based-idinteract-launches-700k-funding/