doxIQ and Leanplum win our GrowthBeat Innovation Showdown

SAN FRANCISCO — They battled hard with their polished pitches, informative videos, and demos, and now our Innovation Showdown judges have selected the winners: doxIQ wins the early-stage category, and Leanplum is the late-stage winner.

DoxIQ lets marketers check out statistics on the documents they send around to potential customers. Users can see how long people view each page, click links, and share files with others. The service can take in documents sitting in Dropbox or Box and integrate them with Hubspot, Marketo, and Mailchimp, co-founder Max Cantor said. The startup went through the StartX accelerator program at Stanford University and has raised money from Data Collective, Orrick, and angel investors.

Leanplum is a one-stop-shop for mobile marketing. It offer tools for content management, mobile automation (notifications), A/B testing, and analytics; and it enables non-technical marketers and product managers bypass having to ask their developers for every tweak or action they’d like to introduce. Moreover, its analytics helps customers see the effects of their tests, including revenue lifts.

Thanks to our judges: Accel Partners’ Kobie Fuller, Foley & Lardner’s Todd Rumberger, Norwest Venture Partners’ Rama Sekhar, and HP Software’s Caroline Tsay.

And thanks to Norwest Venture Partners for hosting the Innovation Showdown.

Check out the rest of the competing companies in our Innovation Showdown.

Early-stage companies:

DocSend

DocSend helps you see what happens when you send documents to other people. In short, you upload your documents into DocSend, which creates links for each, and then tracks how people interact with the document attached to each link, including who’s opened it, how much they spent and on which pages, what links they’ve clicked on, and so on.

Gagein

Gagein does salespeople’s homework for them, meaning that it serves up relevant news, company information, connections other other companies, prior interactions with them, and so on. Using artificial intelligence, Gagein’s tool helps salespeople quickly get up to speed and take action on leads, which is important. Forrester has recently found that when a salesperson gets to a potential customer first, they have a 74 percent chance of closing the deal, according to Gagein marketing head Richard Dym. It also helps them re-engage with current customers and when.

Switch Merge

Switch Merge lets marketers create promotional videos that are customized for each lead. Dubbed as “mail merge for video,” Switch Merge also tracks engagement of those videos, founder and chief executive Andrew Angus said.

Mid-stage companies:

Bluenose

Bluenose gives you a 360-degree view of every single one of your customers, and gives you tools to manage your interactions with them. These include alerts about attention needs, revenue renewal analysis, playbooks on best practices for various interactions, campaigns for efficient yet targeted interactions, and segmented analytics. “When you’re interaction with a customer… you have this profile at your finger tips,” said Bluenose chief executive Don McLennan. At its core, Bluenose wants to help you reduce churn and save customers at risk of leaving.

Jetlore

Jetlore strives to offer “email 2.0 for retailers,” said founder and chief executive Eldar Sadikov. The startup lets retailers send emails with product recommendations that get rendered when people open emails, not when retailers blast out their promotional emails. “What if, instead of static emails, you could send emails driven by up-to-the-minute data?” Sadikov said.

MobileROI

MobileROI, a startup with mobile-focused marketing-automation software, helps marketers make the most of consumers with mobile devices. MobileROI offers predictive-analytics capabilities so brands can get a sense of what potential customers will do next. The startup has already worked with BMW, MasterCard, Gannett, Hearst, and Calvin Klein, said MobileROI chief revenue officer Steve Rowe.

Ninja Metrics

Figuring out how much money you’ll get out of a customer is great, but figuring out how much money they’ll get their friends to give you is even better. Ninja Metrics is in the business of helping you do that, and it calls it “social value.” It’s also in the business of helping you identify these high influencers in your system, and its system is 80-90 percent accurate, according to co-founder and chief executive Dr. Dmitri Williams. Ninja Metrics is built on the science behind social influence in human behavior.

Above: Matt Marshall of VentureBeat, and
Momchil Kyurkchiev of Leanplum

Image Credit: Michael O'Donnell/VentureBeat

Jordan Novet contributed reporting.