Sponsored by Bluecore  

Today marks a critical day in the growth of our young company as we transition officially from TriggerMail to Bluecore, confirm a $6 million Series A round of funding led by FirstMark Capital and share some of the 50+ customers who are reaping the benefits of our intelligent automated email marketing solution.

The past 18 months have been quite a rollercoaster – but the story starts even earlier.  I met our co-founder and CTO, Mahmoud Arram, more than 14 years ago in college. We knew we wanted to work together almost immediately, and despite separate career paths on moves across the country, finally came together in New York City in 2013. Bluecore has grown from an army of two into a company of more than 30 people. Together we’ve built an eCommerce marketing solution that attacks what many marketers consider “industry standard”. Simply put, Bluecore automates the process of creating and distributing triggered emails, dynamically reacting to both customer behaviors and product catalog changes in seconds.

The Bluecore platform addresses a critical pain point for marketers – integration. Traditionally marketers spend days cobbling together data from a variety of sources, including an Ecommerce platform, analytics engine, recommendations systems and Email Service Provider to set up a few automated emails. These systems are labor intensive to implement, scale poorly and fail to deliver the advanced automation capability especially around the product catalog such as price drops, new products and many more. Bluecore’s radically simple integration creates structure out of customer behavior and the product catalog, all through a Javascript based solution. Because of the unique way in which we eliminate the bottlenecks in structuring eCommerce data at scale, on average our customers go from contract to first-email-sent in under a month.

In 2014 a new brand launched email programs powered by Bluecore every 12 days, on average more than 8 per month. From BCBG to Sur La Table, Camping World to Express – more than 70 of the industry’s top retail brands leverage our new approach to automated eCommerce and are reaping the benefits.

While a slick new logo, redesigned Website and custom shoes are all very nice, to me they represent the jumping-off point for of the plan we have in place to seize an amazing opportunity in front of us.

We are delighted to confirm a $6 million Series A round led by FirstMark Capital and the addition of Amish Jani to our board of directors in support of this plan. Amish noted, “There is a fundamental shift happening from software that simply informs to software that takes action. Bluecore sits at the vanguard of this movement by analyzing complex user and product behavior in real time, and intelligently triggering personalized communications based on this data. Bluecore’s quick time to deploy and immediate positive results have driven rapid adoption in the last 12 months.  We couldn’t be more delighted to partner with the team.” Additional participation in the round included Felicis Ventures, Max Krohn and Chris Coyne of OkCupid as well as Sam Yagan, CEO of Match.com.

As we kick of 2015 we do so with a clear set of objectives:
1) Invest in scaling our product to the world’s biggest retailers
2) Expansion of key functional teams – engineering, data science, client-success, sales and marketing
3) Delight our existing and new customers at every opportunity

Please come over to discover who we are and what we’re about.

Welcome to Bluecore. Stop Integrating, Start Marketing.

-Fayez

About Fayez:

Fayez, pronounced like “fries”, but without the “r”. One syllable. See, it’s not that hard.

I am the co-founder and CEO of Bluecore, an organization empowering eCommerce marketers to automate and personalize customer experiences at massive scale. Previously, I was Head of Product at BigDoor where I was responsible for conceiving, executing and iterating on gamified loyalty and rewards programs to increase user retention across the websites of major global brands like NFL, Dell, Adobe and Starbucks to name a few. I also co-founded Gameday Tycoon, a simple fantasy sports game that runs on Facebook. And if we go way back I also co-created Sponty – a service that allowed people to discover music events in town. It was cool before SXSW was too cool.

In a previous life, I was into microprocessor design and simulation. I developed and integrated the first combined Graphics and Processor Memory Controller simulator at AMD to predict and analyze the performance impact of AMD’s Fusion CPUs. My first rookie Master’s publication when I was a student at Georgia Tech was awarded the Best Paper by the prestigious IBM’s TJ Watson Research, and a subsequent publication was adopted by AMD in one of their CPUs even before I finished graduate school. In addition, I also worked on developing graphical frameworks for Simulink and MATLAB at The Mathworks in Boston.

I graduated with a Master’s degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Georgia Tech, where I published several papers on high-performance microprocessor design.

In my downtime, you can find me doing improv shows at Unexpected Productions in New York City.