BlueOcean Raises $30M Led by Insight Partners, with Participation from FJ Labs, as Brands Look to Measure Outcomes and Outpace Competition
San Francisco, CA, USA – WEBWIRE – Wednesday, April 13, 2022
BlueOcean, the leading AI-powered brand decision platform focused on delivering strategic insights and recommendations for executive leadership, today announced that it has raised a $30M Series B funding round led by Insight Partners with participation from FJ Labs.
The news comes after a momentous year for BlueOcean as the team grew from 11 to 100 employees in 12 months and the company scaled up to serve 84 global brands -- representing $18 trillion in market value. This news also comes on the heels of BlueOcean launching new products like Brand Navigator, a powerful AI-driven brand intelligence platform that analyzes 6,000+ brands and enlightens executives with always-on answers about their brand health and competitive positioning.
The latest funding will be used to add key strategic hires across all departments and invest in the AI-driven platform to meet demand from senior leaders as they are faced with a flurry of compounding challenges.
From supply chain shortages and data privacy changes to inflation, the Great Resignation and the ripple effects of the pandemic, each day brings on a new set of problems for businesses to navigate. What’s worse, research from Marketing Week shows that CMO tenures are now at their lowest levels in over a decade, validating that marketers are often the first to exit when growth targets aren’t met.
“BlueOcean Brand Navigator provides a critical tool for the Dynamics 365 team in gaining real-time insights to help focus my teams on the most impactful next actions,“ said Neha Bajwa, Senior Director at Microsoft. ”We set out to inspire curiosity to drive our work forward. Beyond these insights, there is something truly inspiring when we can see evidence of the effectiveness of our actions. It makes me fall in love again with our work.”
As the only solution on the market offering always-on brand data vs. waiting weeks or months for strategic guidance from traditional brand surveyors, BlueOcean arms leadership with insights instantly. With the information, brand marketers and senior leaders are enabled to make more informed decisions about what to -- or not to do -- next and convey business outcomes in real time.
As the driving force behind BlueOcean’s platform, the BlueScore works to measure a brand’s health and positioning in the market relative to competitors. The BlueScore ranges from 0 to 200 and analyzes factors such as familiarity, uniqueness, consistency, relevancy and reveredness to establish a common language and single source of truth to understand brand performance across teams, channels, and product lines. Currently, BlueOcean tracks more than 6,000+ brands, including 80+ in CPG. Enterprise brands trust BlueOcean to keep marketing and business teams in-the-know about their impact, value and competitive context.
“The pressure that brand marketers face when being asked to deliver consistency and growing ROI is one I don’t take lightly because I’ve been in their shoes and it’s a difficult role to be in,” says Liza Nebel, BlueOcean co-founder and President. “At a time when brand is everyone’s business, you just want to clearly, quickly and seamlessly highlight how important brand is to everyone in an organization and give them meaningful and actionable ways they can actually drive performance. It’s a dream to continue to work with Insight Partners and with FJ Labs joining we’ll have an even bigger impact on the brands we serve.”
“After leading BlueOcean’s Series A round, we are proud to also lead their Series B to help them scale and serve even more brands,” said Whitney Bouck, Managing Director at Insight Partners. “As a former CMO myself, I know that marketing is constantly challenged to provide true ROI on brand marketing. BlueOcean gives marketing leaders quantifiable and actionable insights on brand performance for the first time, which we know is game-changing.”
“Our philosophy is that brand equity is your stock price, but unlike stock prices there’s never been a clear number that will tell you how you’re perceived in the market. At BlueOcean, we not only offer that intel, but we also give brands strategic recommendations on how to improve and take their business from X to Y,” says Grant McDougall, co-founder and CEO. “The Insight Partners and FJ Labs network is rich with opportunities for us to partner with more enterprise and consumer brands and we’re honored to have them be part of this round.”
“Having invested in hundreds of the world’s most well-known brands, we know that having accurate and fast data is vital to brand health. We have extreme faith in BlueOcean and we’re excited to bring them into our investment portfolio,” says Fabrice Grinda, Founding Partner at FJ Labs.
The announcement of the new round of funding comes on the heels of the hiring of Liz Tassey and Rinky Gupta as the respective Vice President of Marketing and Chief Financial Officer, as well as the company’s 2021 announcement of Jen Kramer and Andrew Chalmers as the Head of Enterprise Sales and Vice President of Sales.
If you are a marketer and want to improve your brand strategy, sign-up for a demo at blueocean.ai.
About BlueOcean:
BlueOcean is an always-on brand decision intelligence platform that delivers real-time, actionable insights. Using its proprietary AI-powered strategy engine, BlueOcean analyzes 1,200+ data sources to arm organizations with insights to unlock growth relative to competitors, and obtain recommendations to drive overall brand equity. To learn more, go to blueocean.ai.
About Insight Partners
Insight Partners is a global software investor partnering with high-growth technology, software, and Internet startup and ScaleUp companies that are driving transformative change in their industries. As of February 24, 2022, the closing of the firm’s recent fundraise, Fund XII, brings Insight Partners’ regulatory assets under management to over $90B. Insight Partners has invested in more than 600 companies worldwide and has seen over 55 portfolio companies achieve an IPO. Headquartered in New York City, Insight has offices in London, Tel Aviv, and Palo Alto. Insight’s mission is to find, fund, and work successfully with visionary executives, providing them with practical, hands-on software expertise to foster long-term success. Insight Partners meets great software leaders where they are in their growth journey, from their first investment to IPO. For more information on Insight and all its investments, visit insightpartners.com or follow us on Twitter @insightpartners.
About FJ Labs
FJ Labs is an early-stage venture firm/startup studio focused on online marketplaces and consumer Internet companies. Founded by serial entrepreneurs Fabrice Grinda (OLX, Aucland, Zingy) and Jose Marin (Deremate, IG Expansion), FJ Labs has backed over 500 companies including Alibaba, Betterment, Delivery Hero, FanDuel, and Flexport and has been directly engaged in building companies such as Adore Me, Properly, Letgo, and Rebag. More about FJ Labs: fjlabs.com
