Stealth Startup Founded By Autopilot CMO Raises $8 Million, SEC Filings Show

Stealth customer retention startup Brightback, co-founded by Autopilot CMO Guy Marion, has raised over $8M in a new round of funding, according to SEC filings.

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The company was founded in March of 2018 and currently has six employees listed on its Linkedin profile. Brightback hired its CTO, Dani Pletter, in July of this year.

The Deal

According to the filing, the company raised $8.45 million in cash and the proceeds from converting an unspecified number of SAFE securities. 32 investors participated in the deal, though the identities of those investors can’t be derived from the filing.

The first committed capital came in on September 4th. The document is dated September 19th, despite getting posted today. The round is fully-closed, with $0 left to raise.

Who’s Involved

According to the filing, here’s who’s on the company’s board:

• Guy Marion, the company’s co-founder and CEO. Marion previously served as the CMO of email marketing service Autopilot, among other prior roles.
• Shardul Shah, a partner at of Index Ventures.
• Zack Urlocker, a tech executive who currently holds board seats at PubNub, Duo Security, and Revolution Analytics, among others, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Marion was an entrepreneur in residence at Matrix Partners for six months prior to starting Brightback, meaning that the firm likely invested in the young startup.

According to a company post published in May 2018, Brightback celebrated a “recent funding success” and previewed the product. It’s unclear whether the transaction filed today includes the funding glancingly referenced in the company’s post from earlier in the summer.

Other individual investors in the company include Scott Irwin, General Partner at Rembrandt Ventures, Clint Smith, Vice President at data management platform DataStax, Nick Soman, the former growth lead at Gusto, and Geoff Donaker, the former COO at Yelp.

What The Company is Building

Per its website, the company is an “automated customer retention company” which helps “subscription-based businesses grow customer lifetime value.”

In a blog post announcing the company, also dated from last May, Marion said his team is “shining a bright light on the shady world of customer retention and aim to help subscription business everywhere reduce churn, grow lifetime value, and adopt data-driven best practices.”

Beyond that basic information, the company hasn’t released any other details about the product publicly.

Crunchbase News reached out to the company, and Brightback CEO Guy Marion declined to comment on the round. 

Illustration Credit: Li Anne Dias