REDWOOD CITY, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--WorkSpan, the Marketing Network where marketing teams span boundaries to work across internal teams, external go-to-market partners and agencies to orchestrate marketing campaigns and programs, today announced a $9 million series A funding round led by Mayfield. The company is now making its global debut following a very successful early availability program that included SAP, Intel, CenturyLink and Infosys.
“Companies need to engage with thriving ecosystems of partners to make themselves strategic and valuable for their ecosystem. This is a need that is being felt across industries - whether it be cloud providers and enterprise vendors in High Tech, or fast moving consumer goods in CPG, or multi-channel Retailers, or service providers in Financial Services,” said Mayank Bawa, CEO and founder of WorkSpan. “WorkSpan makes joint work with partners visible, accountable, innovative and impactful at scale.”
“WorkSpan allows companies to redefine how they engage with strategic partners,” said Amit Sinha, WorkSpan Chief Customer Officer and founder. “Alliance, field and product marketing leaders no longer need to spend the bulk of their time connecting the dots. Now they have a network and collaborative apps to seamlessly coordinate marketing efforts, so they can focus on jointly winning shared customers and consumers.”
“At Mayfield, we champion entrepreneurs who bring unprecedented innovation to create massive impact,” added Navin Chaddha, Managing Partner at Mayfield. “Mayank, Amit and the team at WorkSpan have defined how marketers can work across company boundaries. We’re excited to partner with them to realize their vision of a Marketing Network that enables companies to unlock exponential potential in creating and shaping demand.”
A fundamentally new way to work across networks of people and companies
Companies on WorkSpan’s Marketing Network can rapidly execute joint marketing programs with any partner company (bilateral campaign) or group of partner companies around the world (multi-way cohort campaigns), which can differ campaign to campaign. On WorkSpan, partner companies can establish a shared system of record, align, create and share campaigns, and propagate them with high velocity to internal and external partners. Companies can also securely seek marketing funds or make funds available to partners, and solicit or submit campaign proposals—an industry first.
WorkSpan is built on a few key innovations:
- Network Security Model: Built on a strong security model of Attribute Based Access Control, WorkSpan grants secure access to persons and companies on the network. Partners see only funds, campaigns and content to which they’ve been given explicit access.
- Network SaaS Model: Multi-tenant network architecture gives each company a secure shared space with other partner companies in their network.
- Network Apps: Cross-Company marketing processes for funding, activities and content approvals that require collaborative flows across companies.
- Network Insights: Information across company boundaries is aggregated and presented to each user in the form of cross-company person recommendations, cross-company campaign and content search and cross-company marketing calendars.
These features bring unprecedented business value to “ecosystem marketing” programs:
- Visibility into status of activities, campaigns and content
- Accountability for performance, budget and funding joint projects
- Velocity in proposing, approving, executing joint projects
- Secure access to audiences, funds, content, people across company boundaries
- Scalability to repeat successful campaigns with more partners across regions and industries
Companies on WorkSpan’s Marketing Network enjoy high engagement rates—nearing 100% engagement with top partner companies—a three-fold increase in demand and brand awareness, and access to partners’ combined audiences.
“With the WorkSpan Marketing Network, 200 Intel and 50 SAP marketers on five continents are working together better than ever before,” said Kathy Barboza, Director of Strategic Software Alliances at Intel.
“Using WorkSpan, we drastically reduced time spent on mundane coordination tasks, doubled the number of campaigns and tripled marketing impact,” said Steve Asche, VP Digital and Partner Marketing, Digital Enterprise Platform Group, SAP.
Added Claire Hockin, Associate VP of Marketing, Infosys, “Not only are we more productive and engaged, but we were up and running on WorkSpan in less than a week.”
WorkSpan was founded in 2015 by Mayank Bawa, Amit Sinha and Milind Joshi. Mayank, our CEO, co-founded and led Big Data pioneer Aster Data Systems, which was acquired by Teradata (NYSE:TDC) in 2011. Amit, our Chief Customer Officer, spent more than a decade at SAP (NYSE: SAP) where he was SVP of Marketing for Database and Applications and grew SAP HANA’s revenue from launch to $1.5B in three years. Milind, our VP of Engineering, comes to WorkSpan with experience leading engineering teams at Teradata, Aster Data, EMC, Sun and TCS. Together, the founders span experience at startups to public companies, and have set industry standards and best practices in their careers.
About WorkSpan
WorkSpan is the premier Marketing Network that marketers can use to rapidly execute joint marketing programs with a circle of trusted partners and agencies. WorkSpan enables cross-company teams to have shared visibility at scale with each partner; give and get access to joint funds, campaigns and content; create and propagate campaigns with high velocity to internal and external partners, and drive mutual accountability towards shared goals. WorkSpan is a privately held company backed by Mayfield and is currently in use by global enterprises including Intel, SAP, CenturyLink and Infosys.
For more information, visit WorkSpan.com and follow @WorkSpan on Twitter and LinkedIn.
