Everybody loves an underdog, even in the world of corporate marketing. Percolate Industries, Inc. hopes to turn that to its advantage with $40 in fresh capital from investors that will be spent trying to beat the giants of cloud-based engagement at their own game, an effort that has proven surprisingly successful so far.

MasterCard, Inc., Levi Strauss & Co. and more than two dozen other household names already count themselves as users of the four-year-old startup’s namesake platform, which provides an environment for handling the different aspects of how an organization presents itself to consumers. That spans everything from scheduling promotional events to addressing complaints through social networks.

Percolate promises to help marketers accomplish that with a fraction of the hassle involved in using a separate tool for each activity as has traditionally been done. Having a unified interface across the full length of the engagement lifecycle also has the added benefit of allowing for more straightforward coordination among the different stages, which the service emphasizes heavily. ​

The planning component at the heart of Percolate is based on a cross-channel marketing calender that organizes the marketing activities for any given project, such as the launch of a new product or a website redesign, in a consolidated view that encompasses every team involved in the effort. Managers can take advantage of that centralization to check up on the progress of work relegated to remote parts of the organization and distribute new assignments through a built-in messaging mechanics.

Percolate provides templates for everything from sending out routine tasks up to the final team-wide brief before a campaign is ready to launch, but the collaboration doesn’t end with the project. The startup has also packaged monitoring capabilities into its service that allow marketing teams to track the performance of their efforts and make changes on-the-fly to optimize engagement accordingly.

That end-to-end approach is hardly unique to Percolate, with most of its bigger and better-known rivals also developing such capabilities. IBM introduced an omni-channel messaging service of its own only a few days ago following similar announcements from Salesforce and Oracle. But as its impressive customer list shows, the startup’s spin on the concept nonetheless manages to stand out from the pack, an opportunity that the investment community simply couldn’t turn down amid the exploding interest in cloud-based marketing services.

Lightspeed Venture Partners led the new $40 million round in Percloate, which also includes contributions from existing backers Sequoia Capital, GGV Capital, First Round Capital and Lerer Hippeau Ventures. The capital infusion brings its total raised so far to a healthy $74 million.
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