Marketo lands $50M from Battery, IVP, InterWest to continue its marketing automation domination

Marketing automation firm Marketo has raised a massive new round of funding — $50 million — that will help it continue assisting companies with aggressive lead and revenue generation, the company announced today.

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“We have a phenomenal growth opportunity now,” Marketo CEO Phil Fernandez told VentureBeat. “Our core business is very scalable, and we’re seeing continued growth in areas like search and social media.”

Marketo and competing marketing automation firms like Eloqua, Pardot and Silverpop offer software and services focused on improving and managing sales lead generation. Ideally, any business with a constant need to find new customers (and retain them) can use marketing automation to help them succeed. One of Marketo’s most recent initiatives is Spark by Marketo, a lead-generation engine for small businesses rather than enterprise and mid-size clients.

“We’ve more than doubled the number of leads generated for other companies in the last year,” Fernandez said. “And we’ve doubled our own sales team in the last year, for that matter.”

The new funding round was led by Battery Ventures, with participation from existing investors Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), InterWest Partners, Mayfield Fund and Storm Ventures. Including the new round, Marketo has raised an incredible $107 million to date.

Battery Ventures general partner Neeraj Agrawal will also become a member of Marketo’s board of directors. “From the moment we first engaged with Phil and the team at Marketo it became clear that the company was powering a revenue revolution,” Agrawal said in a statement. “We are bullish on the company’s ability to execute and believe they are destined to be a true winner.”

San Mateo, Calif.-based Marketo was founded in 2006 and now has 240 employees. Fernandez told us the company expects to “finish next year” with 450 employees, which would be an incredible scaling up of its business if it can accomplish the goal. The company already operates a European office in Dublin and will open new sales offices all over Europe, including in the U.K., France, Germany and Spain.

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