Origami Logic nabs $9.3M to build ‘big data’ tools for marketers

Marketers, thou shalt have “big data.”

Still in stealth mode, Origami Logic has managed to raise a sizable first round of venture funding to further develop and aggressively market its data visualization and analytics tools for marketing teams. “We want to be for marketers what Splunk is for IT,” said Opher Kahane, the company’s CEO.

The Silicon Valley-based startup will use the $9.3 million in funding to bolster its sales and marketing efforts and to hire data scientists and engineers.

In a phone interview, Kahane explained that the team will apply “data science and data visualization” technology to deliver insights to marketers. The company will not yet reveal pricing information or the details of its go-to-market strategy.

When research firm Gartner published a report citing that chief marketing officers will spend more on big data than chief information officers by 2017, it opened the floodgates. Entrepreneurs have turbo-charged into a race to produce the winning product that CMOs will love.

“Today’s marketers are surrounded by a growing number of siloed tools and a ton of fragmented and complex data that slows down their ability to take action,” said Paul Albright, recently Chief Revenue Officer of Marketo and formerly a CMO with companies such as SuccessFactors, NetApp, and Informatica in a statement.

Clearly, something has slowly shifted in the market for enterprise software. Data used to be the domain of technology analysts and IT, while marketers were focused on go-to-market strategies and building a brand. Today’s CMOs are increasingly using tools to leverage relevant data (customer data, social media, and so on) to drive their decisions. The roster of legacy vendors like Oracle and SAP are increasingly angling for their business, while Salesforce.com hopped on that train this year with its acquisition of social media marketing and monitoring tools Buddy Media and Radian6.

Buddy Media CEO Mike Lazerow recently told VentureBeat that software for marketers is the next “billion-dollar” opportunity. 

“The CMO will spend more,” said Jake Flomenberg of Accel Partners, the firm that led Origami Logic’s first funding round. “There is more data that needs to be pulled out of this silo.” Accel’s Flomemberg and Ping Li will join the company’s board.

Flomemberg said that it’s the team behind Origami Logic that puts them in pole position to succeed. Kahane, Ofer Shaked, CTO, and Alon Amit, VP of Product,  have worked in high-ranking positions at Yahoo, Facebook, Google, Juniper Networks and the Israeli Intelligence, with expertise delivering data processing systems for business value creation. Prior to starting the company, Shaked was the CTO at Current TV, the media company led by Al Gore.

Advisors include Elad Gil, former VP of Corporate Strategy at Twitter and Amr Awadallah, Cloudera founder and CTO. In addition, Lightspeed Venture Partners participated in the series A round.