Welcome AudiencePlus: The Owned Media Software for Marketers

Emergence is delighted to announce that we have led AudiencePlus’ $5 million financing round as the company begins to transform the marketing automation industry. We are thrilled to partner with Anthony Kennada and Tyler Sparks, who we believe represent the perfect ‘founder-market-fit’ to reinvent how B2B companies go to market and fuel company growth.

AudiencePlus is a first-of-its-kind software platform that enables marketers to use owned media to build a sustainable pipeline. Imagine if you could own your relationship with your audience. You could launch a beautiful, branded media property on your website without writing a single line of code. You could build your own distribution channel for content. You could go beyond views and listens to understand actual audience engagement at the individual and account level. 

With AudiencePlus, you can.

Here at Emergence, we talk a lot about founder-problem fit, and with Anthony’s deep domain expertise, he is exactly who we look for. We’ve known Anthony for 10 years, as he led marketing teams at Gainsight, Front, and Hopin, building solutions like AudiencePlus in-house and working with external agencies on expensive and time consuming engagements. 

Anthony doesn’t just understand the marketing automation industry–he knows exactly what’s being overlooked in it and what products to create to fill those gaps. His story reminds me of Eric Yuan’s at Zoom. When Eric worked at Webex and began thinking of the idea for Zoom, he was told the web conference space was too saturated, filled with too many large incumbents and not enough opportunity. Eric had first-hand experience with the problems in conferencing. He knew who the customers were and how the existing solutions weren’t making customers happy, then determined what innovation was needed, and today we see Eric (and Zoom’s) massive success. I see that parallel in Anthony and am excited to see him jump to the entrepreneurship side and bring what he knows best to every other company out there. 

So what exactly is AudiencePlus’ platform? AudiencePlus has developed a proprietary platform that they call “Audience Graph.” The platform collects context from content (topics, formats, contributors), audience (job title, company, behavioral data), and outcomes (pipeline impact), in order to train a machine learning model for customers using their own unique data. The four key components of the platform are: a modern “CMS” front end, real-time analytics, a customer data platform backend to manage first party data, and workflow to transform engagement into outcomes.

Similar to web conferencing, existing solutions in this space were built in a different era. Now that many of the incumbent solutions are owned by big organizations and no longer run by founders who know the deep pain points of their customers, they’ve fallen behind on addressing customer needs and technological innovation (particularly in AI). 

Other companies have to rewrite their entire codebase to provide the same value to marketers, but AudiencePlus doesn’t. The initial use cases include recommended content (e.g. Netflix and TikTok) and generative metadata (composing customers models with GPT), but the use cases that AudiencePlus will unlock beyond those two will change the marketing automation industry. With “Audience Graph,” users will be able to integrate their CRM to understand the impact of audience engagement on revenue outcomes.

We’re excited to see AudiencePlus take the great experience that they have delivered to their first customers–Crossbeam, Five9, Gainsight, Lavender, Nextiva, and Zuora–and make it available to everyone else. The value that their platform has already provided in creating audiences of company followers before they become customers will only continue to grow.

Hear more about the platform from Anthony and his team from their announcement, and more about the funding round in TechCrunch.