Evocalize Raises US$12 Million Series A to Democratize Sophisticated Digital Marketing for Local Businesses

(US and Canada) Evocalize, maker of the leading Collaborative Marketing Platform (CMP), today announced a US$12 million Series A funding round led by Move, Inc. (operator of Realtor.com®), and joined by Second Century Ventures and Habanero Ventures. This new investment will enable Evocalize to deepen its market-leading automation and machine learning capabilities to advance digital marketing performance for local businesses, add new channels to reach users everywhere they spend time online, and to expand into new industries to empower local and national-to-local marketers with new powerful, push-button-simple tools.

Local businesses have been largely left behind by the digital marketing revolution and continue to spend the majority of their marketing budgets on offline, unmeasurable, and often ineffective marketing tactics. While they want the marketing results enjoyed by large corporations, local businesses frequently lack the expertise, data, content, and time necessary to gain positive returns from their investments in digital marketing.

At the same time, multi-location brands and tech platforms (like marketplaces and customer relationship management tools) that serve local teams and businesses benefit when they provide local digital marketing capabilities fully integrated into their solutions that are effective and turnkey. These companies have lacked the necessary technology to provide local solutions in a customizable, scaled way that also ensures brand compliance. Evocalize's technology solves these challenges, enabling parent brands and technology providers to quickly launch powerful and unique digital marketing programs for their local teams and users. The programs leverage the right data, creative content, audiences and best practices. Local teams and users can then apply their market expertise to customize and launch programs with just a few clicks.

"Our team has been working closely with Realtor.com for over five years now. No one knows our technology or team better than the industry leaders at Realtor.com, and that makes this investment humbling and incredibly validating of our team and vision," said Matthew Marx, CEO of Evocalize. "Move's investment will allow us to deepen our technology solutions, add additional channels and cross-channel optimization capabilities, and help more industries and the local businesses that surround the home and are impacted by the home transaction."

Evocalize's technology supports businesses across industries, including real estate, mortgage, insurance, multi-family housing, senior living, financial services, restaurants, and travel. Local businesses equipped with Evocalize's solutions see dramatic improvement in their marketing outcomes while reclaiming significant time previously spent on marketing.

"We have a long-standing relationship with Evocalize, and have seen firsthand the benefits of their technology and team," said David Doctorow, CEO of Move, Inc., operator of Realtor.com. "Real estate agents and many other local businesses can use Evocalize to make their marketing more effective, and it's easy to execute."

One Evocalize client in real estate saw weekly time spent on digital marketing by their thousands of agents drop by over 90%, from 9 hours to just 9 minutes. At the same time, agents saw a 400% improvement in the results of their digital marketing.

Kara Jones Director of Marketing at Realty Austin, another Evocalize client shared, "Using [Evocalize's] technology we have been able to increase website traffic from social ads by 83% and decrease our cost per click by over 200%."

"At a time when digital marketing continues to grow increasingly complex, Evocalize helps simplify and make it more accessible," said Doctorow. "Evocalize's collaborative marketing platform has helped us create marketing products and solutions like Market Reach and Local Expert℠, which our broker and agent customers use to connect with local buyers and sellers, save time and generate results. We're pleased to deepen our relationship with Evocalize with this investment and help them bring collaborative marketing to more businesses that surround the home transaction."