LoudCrowd, Inc., a SaaS marketing platform that enables brands to leverage word-of-mouth marketing at scale, announced that it has closed a $515,000 Pre-Seed round led by Active Capital, with participation from local angel investors.

The company was founded by Justin Papermaster and Gary Garofalo with the core belief that a brand's customers are their most powerful asset, and that they are being under-leveraged. Papermaster and Garofalo have extensive experience in the marketing and analytics software space. After meeting and becoming friends in college, they had always planned to start a company together. Previously they held roles leading sales and strategy for successful Austin marketing SaaS startups including TrendKite which sold to Cision for $225 million earlier this year, Spredfast, and Umbel.

In working with leading brands like Nike, and Hershey, Justin and Gary discovered that a clear opportunity emerged. "There is nothing more valuable for a brand than a customer telling their friends they love a product or service. Brands have always struggled to find sustainable and organic ways to encourage customers to do this," says Justin Papermaster, Co-Founder of LoudCrowd.

"Influencer marketing has clearly become a huge and growing business," adds Pat Matthews, founder & CEO of Active Capital. "We love the approach Justin and Gary are taking to help every day consumers become engaged "influencers" for their favorite brands."

The LoudCrowd platform helps brands create a personalized program to turn every customer into a vocal brand supporter. LoudCrowd makes this possible by allowing companies to provide their customers an incentive to share their love of the brand on social media, in essence turning existing customers into micro influencers. While LoudCrowd considers themselves platform agnostic, most of its clients are focused on Instagram as the most important social platform for marketing to new customers. LoudCrowd is betting that user generated content (UGC) is an extremely important but often neglected type of media, and they are providing a brand the tools to measure and improve that content.

"Loudcrowd helped amplify our connection with our customers and affiliates," says Ana Montilla, Social Media Manager for Verb Products. "It motivated them to go beyond the purchase, post about Verb on social media and actually enjoy doing it!"

To sign up for LoudCrowd or book a demo, please visit https://loudcrowd.com or email hello@loudcrowd.com.

ABOUT LOUDCROWD:
LoudCrowd was founded in March 2019 to help brands scale word-of-mouth marketing by turning their existing customers into vocal brand supporters . Based in Austin, Texas, LoudCrowd has developed a SaaS marketing platform that enables brands to promote customer sharing of user generated content (UGC). With the platform, brands can create incentives for customers to create content, connect with customers on an individualized basis, and measure the value of customers' UGC. To learn more, visit https://loudcrowd.com.

ABOUT ACTIVE CAPITAL
Active Capital is a venture firm designed to lead seed rounds for B2B SaaS companies. The firm is founded by Pat Matthews, co-founder and former CEO of Webmail.us, a B2B SaaS company that was ranked #217 on the Inc. 500 fastest growing companies in America and sold to Rackspace in 2007. Active Capital is headquartered in San Antonio, Texas and invests in B2B SaaS companies in cities across America. To learn more, please visit http://www.activecapital.com