By Allan Maurer

RESTON, VA—Clarabridge, which sells text analysis software used to improve customer relationship management, has raised a $12 million Series C round led by Grotech Ventures with existing investors Harbert Venture Partners, Boulder Ventures, and Intersouth Partners participating.

The company says the new funding will enable it to expand sales and marketing efforts and product development. While the company does not disclose the number of its employees, its says it will double its workforce this year, adding staff in customer support, engineering, marketing and sales.

Sid Banerjee, CEO, tells TechJournal South the funding will fuel hiring through the end of this year. “Based on the current ramp up, we expect to be turning the corner on profitability in the 2010 time frame.”

He notes that the company has experience dramatic growth. “We grew fivefold from 2006 to 2007 and we’re on tract to double again this year. We have good traction in a down market,” he says.

Introduced in 2007
“What we sell is geared to help companies tap into customer sentiment and hold on to those they have.”

Clarabridge introduced the industry’s first software-as-a-service (SaaS) text analytics solution in June 2007, which has been rapidly adopted by customers. In 2007, Clarabridge tripled its customer base and grew revenues by 500 percent. This year Clarabridge recorded its two highest revenue producing quarters in the first half of 2008.

Clarabridge helps Fortune 1000 companies better understand their customers by capturing and analyzing consumer content from various company feedback points, such as call center notes, qualitative survey feedback, web 2.0 content, and online consumer forums.

The company categorizes this information, determines a sentiment score, then presents this information in various reporting formats used by company executives to identify areas of the business where improvements can be made, such as product quality, marketing and customer care.

By doing so, companies can more reduce churn, improve customer loyalty and create more profitable customer relationships and products.

Its content mining service has been adopted in a variety of industries including airlines, consumer packaged goods, entertainment, financial/insurance services, healthcare, hospitality, marketing services, retail and technology.

Fortune 1000 customers
Fortune 1000 companies including Gap, Gaylord Entertainment Company, H&R Block Digital Tax Solutions and Affiliates, Intuit, Lowe’s Companies, Marriott International, Oracle USA, Sage Software, TNS Custom Research, and United Airlines have deployed Clarabridge solutions in the past year.

“This current investment round will enable us to continue to aggressively expand our business footprint within the customer experience management space,” says Banerjee.

“Whether you in the hotel, travel or software business, you may be selling a service not too terribly different from your competitors’, so assuming all other things are equal, what’s the differentiator?

“What is lacking in a lot of companies is the ability to take purely unstructured feedback and turn it into getting a real feeling for what the customer is focused on.”

Mining unstructured text exchanges is the future of market research, he says.

On the Web: www.clarabridge.com

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