Rhiza's fresh $3M could help bridge the gap between big data & big sales

Rhiza, founded by Josh Knauer, just closed a $3 million funding round. The startup makes marketing analytics tools that help bridge the gap between big data and salespeople.

Notably behind the latest funding round is Draper Triangle Ventures, along with Camp One Ventures and Arthur Ventures. According to Knauer, the new capital will help expand sales while focusing on marketing and top notch customer service. It couldn’t have happened at a better time as market demand for Rhiza products grows.

In-demand products

Offering an entire suite of products, Rhiza is designed to optimize revenue for every advertiser and media company. It can quickly draft an easy-to-implement marketing campaign and provides unique recommendations using consumer insights as a foundation. Until recently, Rhiza has focused on serving major media companies and counts Univision, Comcast and Cox Media among its clients. Specifically, offering their ad sales teams the necessary tools to be more effective when delivering customized sales pitches is the specialty of Rhiza’s software suite.

The result? More data-driven decisions which are founded on the needs and wants of target markets.

“Focusing on consumer marketing analytics will allow us to significantly scale the company over the coming years across many vertical channels such as consumer packaged goods, healthcare/pharma, retail chains” and others, said Knauer in an interview with VentureBeat.

Room for growth

While Rhiza has been successful in securing and serving major enterprises “with many hundreds or thousands of users of our tools,” Knauer points out that the simple to use tools can empower just about anyone to quickly and easily get answers from the data without needing to involve IT exerts or database analysts. This can include executives, marketers for any company, and salespeople across all platforms.

“We hope, over time, to be able to provide our tools to beyond just the large enterprise market,” says Knauer.

Customized recommendations are a key selling point for Rhiza, and the software truly puts the “personal” into personalization.

Knauer says, “The Rhiza tool goes beyond just providing a dashboard of statistics and actually uses algorithms and business logic to help our clients anticipate where their target customers are likely to be (geographically, online, etc.) and how to best reach them.”

This includes very specific recommendations for advertising channels that best match target demographic behaviors across all media types such as print, radio, digital, and television.

Rhiza users can take advantage of recommendations for which message is most effective for target customers.

What’s in store

Knauer says that Rhiza is all about helping to “proper their businesses forward,” and that’s exactly what this recent capital can catapult. Thanks to the three venture firms now backing Rhiza, “We will not only be able to better serve our current clients, but also reach new audiences and refine our innovative tools for visualizing, analyzing, and sharing data.”

So what’s in store for Rhiza and customers? An expanded suite of analytics that features tools for fast marketing plans, all of which support various channel media buys. The software drafts marketing/sales materials that are both driven by data and intriguing.

What Rhiza has created is providing better and faster answers to some of marketing’s toughest questions, like how to communicate with and influence consumers. According to backer Mike Stubler or Draper Triangle Ventures, “Rhiza is disrupting the marketing analytics industry with intuitive tools for marketers and salespeople across the entire enterprise at a fraction of the cost.”