• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, September 24, 2012

eXelate said Monday it has secured $12 million in Series C funding led by new investor NewSpring Capital. Glenn T. Rieger, a general partner of Philadelphia-based NewSpring Capital, will join eXelate's board of directors. The company will use the funding to expand worldwide and grow its product line related to data and analytics.

eXelate will address several emerging trends, notes Mark Zagorski, the company's CEO: custom modeling and adaptive audience intelligence. In the former, marketers use their own data as a "seed" to model more relevant target audiences and accelerate the purchase funnel. In the latter, marketers modify targeting models in real-time to adapt to how audiences are interacting with the brand. He said both move the audience targeting business away from "cookie cutter segmentation" and into a model where data conforms to the client, not the other way around. 

Zagorski said:  "I think we are just scratching the surface with regard to how big data can be applied to making messaging smarter for advertisers and consumers."

Today, companies look for obvious demographic and behavior patterns that lead to higher relevancy and ad performance, but they remain in the early stages of digging up trends from seemingly unassociated events, he said. This takes what he considers a "serious investment in data scientists and infrastructure that are specifically focused on ad targeting." That investment is holding back companies, but there are signs that the situation is changing.

"Going beyond 'the platform' and actually providing solutions will be critical in supporting marketers and helping them get the value of big data," Zagorski said. "The innovations will come through solutions partnerships, not just by selling technology."