Pursway, an innovator in big data marketing analytics, today announced it has closed a $7.2 million round of funding from existing investors, Battery Ventures and Globespan Capital Partners. The new investment will be used to expand the product and sales teams to support the increased demand in data-driven marketing technology. Pursway's software dramatically improves customer acquisition, cross-sell and retention by imprinting a social graph onto existing customer and prospect data, identifying actual relationships between buyers and empowering marketers to better target customers with demonstrated influence over others' purchasing decisions.

'There's no question that big data and social influence have given marketers valuable insight into their target buyers, but translating that data into sales continues to be the Achilles heel,' said Scott Tobin, general partner, Battery Ventures. 'Pursway takes a completely different approach, relying on transaction and interaction data, revealing previously invisible social connections that drive actual and measurable consumer behavior. As a result, the demand from major retailers, financial institutions and telecom providers has been significant. We're confident that Pursway will continue to disrupt the way marketers use data to generate sales.'

Pursway overlays its proprietary relationships database onto existing customer and prospect data to identify important relationships and uncover true influence relationships. Pursway's Influence Value Order (PIVO) technology identifies those people who disproportionately influence the purchase of specific products or services in a particular population. By combining big data techniques with factual evidence of social influence marketers are able map meaningful relationships between prospects and customers in a database and are consistently achieving a 2-5X return on marketing programs.

'Marketers are constantly focused on improving campaign effectiveness -- more data is great, but more impactful and easy-to-work-with insights are better,' said Steven Fuld, senior vice president, Sony Card Marketing & Services Company at Sony Corporation of America. 'Pursway has shown the ability to efficiently give us a single view of customer and prospect data, analyzing true relationships between the people in our databases, and identifying real purchase influence. Our prospecting campaigns were optimized based on information provided by Pursway's PIVO technology and results and conversions increased by 200 percent. New campaigns with better targeted messages have consistently brought new prospects on board and deepened our brand engagement with influencers.'

Pursway Connect -- a proprietary database of more than 100 million U.S. consumers and their social relationships -- transforms existing customer and prospect databases into an exclusive social graph built from thousands of open web sources (e.g., alumni lists, event attendees, employment history, blog responses) to mathematically identify true influence relationships. After overlaying the brand's unique purchase data, Pursway delivers topic-based PIVO influence indexes that pinpoints the eight to 15 percent of people that will purchase based on real-life friends and family influence.

'Our customers are achieving significant increases in customer acquisition and retention by better targeting customers and prospects that tend to buy what their friends buy,' said Dave Ellenberger, CEO, Pursway. 'This new round of funding reflects our investors' confidence in our ability to transform the way marketing is being done. It gives us the capital to reach more organizations that are realizing the power big data has in converting prospects and retaining customers.'

About Pursway
Pursway dramatically improves customer acquisition, cross-sell and retention by unlocking the power of customer and prospect data. Leveraging sophisticated algorithms and its proprietary database, Pursway imprints a social graph onto existing and prospect data, identifying actual relationships between buyers and empowering marketers to better target customers with demonstrated influence over others' purchasing decisions. Serving customers such as Comcast, Orange and Sony, Pursway consistently increases companies' marketing ROI by 2-5X. Backed by Battery Ventures and Globespan Capital Partners, headquartered in Waltham, Mass. and Herzliya, Israel, Pursway is led by a team with a proven track record in advanced machine learning, social network analytics, and consumer marketing disciplines. For more information, visit www.pursway.com.