Kahuna Catches $45M to Make Marketing Smarter and More Automated

Kahuna

Kahuna Inc. has raised another $45 million as efforts to help companies get the right marketing message at the right time to millions of people continue to evolve.

Tenaya Capital led the Series B round, which follows a series of executive hires at Kahuna. The company has attracted people from Salesforce.com Inc., Cisco Systems Inc. and Zendesk Inc., among others, despite being a little over three years old.

The application of big data to marketing is still new, and Chief Executive Adam Marchick, a former venture capitalist who grew up in Silicon Valley and also worked briefly at Facebook, said Kahuna is productizing some of what Facebook has done with its growth marketing team.

“This is about understanding the person on both the Web and mobile [devices],” Mr. Marchick told VentureWire. “Facebook…saw that.”

Kahuna’s software uses machine learning to help companies engage and communicate with people–whether they are on email, social networks or mobile apps–by focusing on their behavior regardless of where they are. It reads digital signals that can help marketers decide, for instance, when someone is most receptive to receiving a message; when is the best time to follow up if an action, such as a purchase, isn’t completed; and which variants of messages and marketing campaigns are most effective.

Current investors Sequoia Capital and SoftTechVC also participated in the new round, which takes total funding in Kahuna to about $58 million. Tenaya Managing Director Ben Boyer joins the board.

Read the full article about Kahuna’s funding, including how some of its customers are using the technology, at Dow Jones VentureWire.

Write to Deborah Gage at deborah.gage@wsj.com. Follow her on Twitter at @deborahgage

Kahuna Catches $45M to Make Marketing Smarter and More Automated