Canadian Startup Influitive Raises $3.7 Million

Toronto’s Influitive, a startup that specializes in customer advocate management and mobilization, announced today it has raised $3.75 million in funding from First Round Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, New Enterprise Associates, Relay Ventures, Illuminate Ventures, CommonAngels, Resolute.VC, Golden Venture Partners, Accelerator Ventures, 500Startups, and other angels and firms.

Influitive also revealed that James Geshwiler, managing director of CommonAngels, will be joining the startup’s board of directors.

“The size and breadth of this seed round of funding far exceeds our expectations,” said Mark Organ, co-founder and CEO of Influitive. “Not only does it include some of the most renowned venture capital firms and individual angel investors, but we also raised funds from both coasts of the United States, Canada, Europe and Asia.”

“Influitive’s visionary approach to mobilizing and socializing customer advocates solves a significant problem for B2B companies—leveraging their advocates to increase sales velocity,” said Chris Fralic, partner, First Round Capital. “Mark Organ and his team have the experience to develop this exciting new market opportunity, as they have done previously when building Eloqua, a global market leader in B2B marketing automation. We believe that they have a great opportunity to build the next global marketing platform, that is advocate-based at its core.”

Influitive has created a new marketing platform, AdvocateHub, that helps companies leverage and mobilize their most valuable assets—their passionate customer advocates, evangelists and fans. Influitive’s vision is to provide a superior game-like experience for the advocates, resulting in a significant increase in the quality and quantity of advocate activity. At the same time, companies can scale their advocate operations into the hundreds or thousands of advocates with the unique self- service, always-on AdvocateHub approach, driving more tailored reference calls, referral leads, success stories, social media contributions and more.

“We are pleased to see Influitive raise this impressive round from some of the most highly regarded early-stage venture firms and angels, including one of our board members at Xactly,” said Chris Newton, Vice President of Marketing for Xactly Corporation. “Our AdvocateHub, Friends of Xactly, has driven a lot of measurable value for us and we look forward to seeing Influitive build out their inspiring vision in the years to come.”

Influitive says its customers include some of most successful and fastest-growing business-to-business software firms in the world. They use their AdvocateHubs to shorten their customers’ buying processes while maximizing win rates against competitors, the company says.