Brandcast’s simple but powerful site management tech wins $1.5M from Benioff

As an emerging content-management system provider, Brandcast strives to be both easy to use and full-featured for big businesses. And so far the startup has been doing an excellent job of striking that balance, at least from the perspective of its sole backer, Salesforce.com founder and chief executive Marc Benioff.

Benioff has frequently logged in to Brandcast and enjoyed checking out new features on the cloud-based service, Brandcast chief executive Hayes Metzger told VentureBeat.

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“In his opinion, there still wasn’t something out there that was doing everything it should be in this particular area of business, Metzger said.

Now Benioff is putting $1.5 million in new funding behind the startup, which will help it add new business-focused features and work closely with customers to keep them building websites on Brandcast.

The increased backing comes just a week after a couple of other, more popular providers of content-management systems, namely Automattic and Squarespace, announced new funding.

But Brandcast aims to win over lots of medium-sized businesses, who might for years have been dealing with on-premises site management software from companies like Adobe, Microsoft, and IBM. These days, medium-sized businesses might be eager to empower employees in lots of field offices to keep their own sites up to date, instead of having corporate take care of everything and produce sub-par, outdated websites.

Brandcast’s software keeps files in its cloud and lets multiple people collaborate on pages with the ease of Google Docs. It also produces mobile-friendly responsive sites. That’s what could make it a good candidate for replacing old-guard content-management systems.

On Brandcast, there’s no need to wedge your content into templates; instead, people can work with their own assets by dragging and dropping and clicking, allowing for more collaboration and more frequent web publishing, said Metzger, who previously cofounded Bandpage and helped launch and update the Salesforce.com platform.

Years ago he met Benioff while working at Salesforce on customer-facing project. That led to the Salesforce executive funding Brandcast for the first time. To date Brandcast has taken on $3.3 million, all from Benioff.

San Francisco-based Brandcast started in 2012, and it launched and kicked off a beta for hundreds of users last year. A lot of them are staying with the company and “will hopefully stick around with us for a long time,” Metzger said.

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Now, he said, the company has 12 employees and a handful of paying customers, including Faller Real Estate and Touchstone Commercial Partners.