Kenshoo engineers cloud-based digital marketing solutions and predictive media optimization technology for large-scale digital advertising. The company is a Facebook strategic Preferred Marketing Developer with native API solutions for ads across Facebook, FBX, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, Yahoo Japan, Bing, Baidu and CityGrid. It recently emerged its Halogen predictive modeling engine from beta to automatically optimize campaigns. Kenshoo delivers more than 1 trillion digital advertisements annually and tracks over $200 billion in annualized online client sales revenue. Led by co-founder and CEO Yoav Izhar-Prato, the company serves clients including CareerBuilder, Expedia, Facebook, KAYAK, Sears, Tesco, Walgreens and Zappos. The company plans to use the financing to further expand operations. Kenshoo offers three main products — Kenshoo Enterprise, Kenshoo Local, and Kenshoo Social — for managing search, local and social advertising campaigns. The company manages more than $3 billion annually in search engine marketing and delivers more than 1.5 billion search marketing and 1 billion social marketing impressions per day. Clients include Expedia, Facebook, Hitwise, Kayak, LendingTree, Omnicom Media Group, Sears, Starcom MediaVest Group, Tesco, Travelocity, Walgreens, and Zappos. Kenshoo recently raised $12M in new funding and says the proceeds will be used to fund continued growth, expand in key geographic markets, and create new products that address the entire purchase funnel. The company also reports its valuation has tripled since its last round in 2010 and its total funding now stands at $30M. KENSHOO offers search marketing campaign management and optimization tools, with flagship products KENSHOO Search and KENSHOO Local, and automation solutions across channels like Google, Yahoo, Bing, Facebook, AOL, Baidu, and Yandex. The company is profitable and has doubled in valuation since 2009. It currently operates from nine locations on four continents, including a recently added office in Sydney, Australia. Armed with fresh funds from Sequoia’s Growth Fund, KENSHOO plans to open two new European offices (in Paris and an unnamed German city) and expand its presence in Asia. The new funding will also enable expansion into additional domains such as new social media advertising channels and the development of re-targeting technologies. Kenshoo provides an “end-to-end” search engine marketing (SEM) product that automates the creation and management of labor-intensive search marketing campaigns. The platform is designed to free marketers to focus on driving traffic, raising conversion rates, and improving ROI. Kenshoo evaluates campaign quality in addition to bid management, differentiating it from basic bid-management tools. It competes with offerings from DoubleClick, aQuantive’s Atlas Solutions, and Omniture. The company has attracted VC interest, and new funding is intended to support further marketing into Europe. Kenshoo automates the end-to-end process of creating and managing search-engine marketing campaigns, including finding relevant keywords across search engines and adjusting campaigns to maximize returns. Its software evaluates campaign quality beyond traditional bid-management tools. The company competes with bid-management offerings from DoubleClick, aQuantive's Atlas Solutions, and Omniture. Prior to this round it raised about $1 million from angel investors and had been funding itself from operations. Sequoia Capital has invested in Kenshoo in its first venture round; terms were undisclosed though an Israeli paper reported the amount as a few million dollars. Kenshoo plans to use the new funds for a marketing push into the UK and parts of Europe in Q1 2008 and into the U.S. in Q2 2008.

Total raised

$32M

Funding rounds

5

Latest round

Equity

Latest activity

Apr 2014