Lattice Engines gets $28M to stay on top of the crystal ball

What salespeople want is a crystal ball that will predict who will buy, what they will buy, and when.

Lead scoring companies like Lattice Engines, which use past behavior and other data to predict future actions, have been trying to grant that wish. Today, the San Mateo, California-based company is announcing a new funding round of $28 million so it can grow its predictive powers.

CEO and cofounder Shashi Upadhyay described his company to me as “the most widely used suite of predictive marketing and sales applications” on the market.

Lattice, he said, is five to ten times larger than the next largest companies in this space, such as Fliptop or Leadspace. Other predictive lead companies include Infer, Mintigo, and 6sense.

A key reason for this round — which the company said could be its last — “is to consolidate our position in the minds of customers who are serious about predictive marketing and sales,” he told me.

Other companies “focus on a single use-case, are built for the SMB [small- to medium-size businesses], and aren’t able to support companies with any kind of scale,” he said. By contrast, he added, Lattice is “scalable from the mid-market through the [Fortune 500], secure at the highest level, and international.”

Upadhyay sees the past year as a very good one for the company.

International growth, data partnerships

It has helped clients like DocuSign boost its win rates to 38 percent, a 22-times return on investment within the first two months. It has grown its presence in Europe and Asia Pacific, and it partnered with digital marketing company Leadteq to bring Lattice predictions to the Nordic countries.

Lattice boasts over three dozen data partnerships with the likes of Dun & Bradstreet, LexisNexis, Experian, and others, in addition to its own data collection for more than 150 million businesses worldwide.

In May, Lattice announced it would add intent data to its arsenal, so it could move beyond predicting who in your current database will buy your products, to adding new leads you might not yet know about.

VB recently released Q1 2015 Marketing Tech Funding Landscape
$99 on VB Insight, or free with your martech subscription

During his time at consulting firm McKinsey, Upadhyay said he had noticed a pattern.

“If you had a good model for predicting who would buy and when,” he said, “it could dramatically improve the performance of marketing and sales teams.” The approach started to gain traction in 2010, when an early customer ran an A/B test with their sales team and found that Lattice’s recommendations about leads were “outperforming the median rep by over 30 percent.”

“That’s when we knew we were on to something,” he said.

Founded in 2006, the company has received $75 million in investment to date. This series D investment round was led by River Cities Capital Funds and Piper Jaffray Merchant Banking, along with other investors that included Blue Cloud Ventures and existing backers Sequoia Capital and New Enterprise Associates.

It will used for building out a predictive suite for every conceivable channel, expanding into Europe and Asia, growing the partner ecosystem, and going into new industry verticals.