Since its founding in 2014, PebblePost has made marketing history with its Programmatic Direct Mail system, which sends individuals physical mail advertisements based on their online data and interests. Today, the company announced it has raised a Series C funding round worth $25 million to scale its efforts.
As CEO Lewis Gersh explained to Built In NYC, “[PebblePost] uses online interest and intent data to send meaningful mail that influences at-home purchase decisions and drives conversions across all transaction channels,” he said. “This newest raise will help us accelerate adoption of Programmatic Direct Mail to meet the escalating demand from marketers.”
The latest funding round — the first since a $27 million debt financing in June 2017 — was led by Advance Venture Partners (AVP), with previous investors RRE, Greycroft and Tribeca Venture Partners also participating. David inbAle, a managing partner at AVP, will join PebblePost’s board of directors as part of the deal.
“Marketers are responding extremely well to the innovative approach of PebblePost’s Programmatic Direct Mail platform,” ibnAle said in a press release on the funding. “The platform marries the brawn of direct mail with the brains of digital technology and data science.”
With the support of AVP and others, PebblePost plans to continue its growth and scale its platform.
“With hundreds of consumer brands on our platform we have a distinct advantage in serving the market we created,” said Lewis Gersh, PebblePost’s founder and CEO, in a press release. “We’re hearing from those brands that we’ve created the first new channel since search and social, significantly transforming the market.”
One company that has seen immense success with PebblePost’s marketing strategy is Boxed — the highly successful home-delivery service that just raised $111 million in funding of its own. In a press release, Boxed CEO and co-founder Chieh Huang offers a closer look at how PebblePost integrates with companies on a day-to-day basis:
“Boxed has worked with PebblePost for over two years. They help us target potential customers with a more tailored message,” said Huang. “We’re able to manage highly effective direct mail campaigns as we would digital, with all the targeting, data science, A/B testing, attribution and quantitative analysis that we’d expect from digital.”
These capabilities are set to become more robust in the coming year, with Gersh explaining, “Engineering and data science teams plan to double in size over the next year to expand the company’s machine learning capabilities.”
