• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, October 13, 2015

Boomtrain secured $12 million in Series A funding with participation from Sierra Ventures, Cota Capital and Lerer Ventures -- raising more than $14 million to date, the company announced Tuesday.

Nick Edwards, CEO of Boomtrain, told Search Marketing Daily the company will use the funding to build out services by hiring engineers and data scientists. "Machine learning has the opportunity to reach consumers, one to one," he says.

Today the company's machine learning engine focuses on personalizing marketing messages in emails, but in the future he hints the predictive layer could move to support a variety of advertising. "It's something we think about," he says. "In many ways an ad is similar to a piece of content. It's where the ecosystem is going."

Michael Powers, SVP at CBS Interactive, a Boomtrain client, sees machine learning technology in the future of publishing and commerce.

"We want to focus the personalization on the purchase or ecommerce, rather than the content," Edwards says.

For Boomtrain, the goal is to create a suite of engines using personalization algorithms that adapt to marketing needs. Each engine will focus on a specific problem such as maximizing a click-through rate or predicting ecommerce. The platform would link and combine the engines in real-time to create custom systems for each client.

The predictions on what content to serve consumers comes from first-party data that describes how they interact with brands. The platform also uses metadata from content about products. The technology categorizes it into topic models.