Israeli start up Gigya, which has developed a customer identity management platform, has raised $35 million in growth capital, in a round led by Intel Capital. Also participating in the round are Common Fund Capital and Vintage Investment Partners, as well as existing investors Adobe, Advance Publications, Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures, Greenspring Associates and Mayfield Fund. This round brings Gigya’s total funding to $104 million.
Gigya says that its cloud platform for customer identity management helps companies build better customer relationships by turning unknown visitors to into known, loyal and engaged customers, and that with its technology, businesses increase registrations and identify customers across devices, consolidate identity data into rich customer profiles, and create personalized user experiences by integrating data into marketing and service applications. The company claims to have seen enormous adoption of its technology in the last year, and says that it is on pace to process more than one billion registrations and logins in 2014. The company counts more than 700 of the world’s largest businesses as its customers, including NBC, Forbes, AutoTrader, Dell, PacSun, Tommy Hilfiger, and Barneys New York.
“The days of anonymity on the Internet are over. That’s a good thing,” says Gigya CEO Patrick Salyer, “Consumers have made it clear that customization and personalization are here to stay. To get there, businesses need to understand the wants and needs of their customers, and that starts with identity. But many approaches to collecting and managing customer information violate user privacy and data regulations, and are neither accurate nor useful. Moreover, legacy approaches aren’t up to the technical task: they can’t handle the unstructured data generated from mobile and social applications. We designed our customer identity platform from the ground up to manage the complexities of the modern consumer’s identity, including issues around social, mobile, privacy and security. Our alliance with Intel enables us to continue to innovate and make the web more customized for everyone.”
Gigya says that, with its new capital injection, it will invest heavily in expanding its global market share by devoting resources to scale its sales, marketing and client services teams across its seven offices around the world. The company also plans to expand its product line. Additionally, through their expanded relationship, Gigya and Intel Security will be working together to bring new solutions to market that will allow consumers to effortlessly authenticate on sites and mobile applications.
“When we looked at addressing the problem of passwords, we were impressed with the platform and reach that Gigya has developed. Given its scale, proven leadership and ubiquity in the market, we saw a huge opportunity to not only collaborate with the company but also to invest,” said Mark Hocking, vice president and general manager of Safe Identity at Intel Security, “We look forward to working with Gigya even more closely as we create innovative customer identity management capabilities that make authentication both easy and secure.” Intel Security was set up on the basis of McAfee, which Intel bought four years ago for $7.7 billion.
Gigya was founded in 2006 by three former managers at Hotbar: Eyal Magen, Eran Kutner, and Rooly Eliezerov. It has offices in Mountain View, California, Tel Aviv, and London.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on November 4, 2014
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