California-based Brandcast, a code-free website platform that allows marketing teams to create, manage and publish their websites has announced that it has closed a $13.9 million Series A financing round led by Shasta Ventures along with contribution from existing investor Marc Benioff and new investor Correlation Ventures. Brandcast has raised a total of $19.4 million and intends to push the company’s accelerating growth in the enterprise sector.
Richard Yanowitch, Brandcast CEO, said, “We are disrupting the legacy platforms that make enterprise websites tedious to design, expensive to deploy, and dependent on developers for execution. 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.”
Brandcast allows non-technical users that are willing to launch customized websites in minutes or hours and publish them with a click of mouse and make it code-free and mobile ready. According to Brandcast, it is used by brands like Lowe’s, Colliers, and New York Fashion Week and they have put content creators back in charge of the design, deployment, and updating of their websites.
In a blogpost Yanowitch explained, “In a nutshell, we’ve zeroed in on the specific creative needs of marketers and designers to help them engage with their customers throughout the marketing lifecycle, while freeing up IT resources for other pressing corporate priorities. You’ll be seeing some very powerful and exciting developments from us as we continue to enhance the Brandcast platform using this most recent round of funding. We’ll also continue to build our world-class engineering, design, and customer-facing functions to respond to the enthusiastic demand in the marketplace.”
According to report in Forrester, enterprises have an average of 268 different customer-facing websites (some have more than 1,000). 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.
Doug Pepper, Managing Director at Shasta Ventures said, “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. 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.”