Highspot, a cloud-based sales engagement platform that helps companies engage more effectively with customers, today announced the closing of $9.6 million in Series A financing, including the conversion of the existing seed notes, led by Madrona Venture Group. Highspot scores and recommends content, delivers real-time alerts on how customers are engaging, and provides advanced analytics so any enterprise can optimize their sales cycle.

Highspot is closing in on a market ripe for innovation. 'If you want to succeed in sales and marketing you need to get inside the mind of your customer. Today that is very hard to do,' Highspot co-founder and CEO Robert Wahbe said. 'With Highspot, we can tell you the information that is resonating with your customer and pinpoint how they are using it. That gives marketing and sales organizations a crucial edge as they compete for the time and attention of ever busier customers.'

Unique in the market, Highspot closes the loop across marketing, sales, and the customer, delivering end-to-end analytics to optimize the buyer's journey, data science to arm sellers with the most effective content, and an intuitive experience to share content with customers. Highspot is geared to the way sales people work, offering a fully featured mobile and tablet version that gives an immediate snap shot of what content is working and what isn't.

'Content marketing is not a new way to reach the customer, but there is a lot of time wasted on creating and sharing content that just doesn't get read,' said Tim Porter, Managing Director of Madrona Venture Group. 'Robert and his team are bringing data science to the workings of sales and marketing to allow them to close more deals and do it more quickly. We are excited to work with such a great team.' As part of the financing, Porter will join the Highspot board.

Highspot's sales engagement platform closes the loop across marketing, sales and customers:

Provides an intelligent portal so sales and marketing teams can easily find, share, and re-purpose the best content
Delivers dynamic sales playbooks with content scored by effectiveness
Allows sellers to present content to customers and receive real-time alerts on engagement
Reports to sales leaders on the success of their teams in sharing the most impactful content
Generates analytics that point marketing and sales teams to the content that works
Integrates fully within existing CRM systems like Salesforce.com and file services such as Box and Dropbox

Highspot was founded by a group of former senior executives at Microsoft. CEO Wahbe was Corporate Vice President for the Server and Tools Division; VP Product Oliver Sharp served as General Manager of Strategy for the Server and Tools Division; VP Engineering Scot Gellock was General Manager of Engineering for Identity and Networking Services of the Windows Azure platform; and Chief Architect David Wortendyke was a Partner Architect for Windows Azure.

Highspot was also recently recognized by Gartner Group, Inc. in their research report, 'Cool Vendors in Smart Machines, 2014.'

To learn more about Highspot or to sign up for a free trial, please visit http://www.highspot.com/

About Highspot, Inc.

Highspot, a cloud-based sales engagement platform, improves the way companies engage with customers. Using Highspot, sales teams are connected to the most relevant content for each situation, have flexible ways to present content to customers, and gain real-time visibility into whether customers find the content engaging. Advanced analytics lets marketing and sales understand how content is performing across the sales cycle and provides actionable insights so pitches and content can be optimized. By closing the loop across marketing, sales, and customers, Highspot uniquely delivers insights that help companies engage more effectively with customers, driving increased revenue and customer satisfaction. For more information, visit www.highspot.com.

About Madrona Venture Group

Madrona (www.madrona.com) has been investing in early-stage technology companies in the Pacific Northwest since 1995 and has been privileged to play a role in some of the region's most successful technology ventures. The firm invests predominately in seed and Series A rounds across the information technology spectrum including consumer Internet, commercial software and services, digital media and advertising, networking and cloud computing, and mobile. Madrona manages nearly $1 billion and was an early investor in companies such as Amazon.com, Apptio, Isilon Systems, Sharebuilder, and Tier3.