• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, January 29, 2016

BloomReach added $56 million to its coffer Friday in a Series D funding round, which comes at a time when many public software as a service (SaaS) companies have reportedly experienced a 40% decline in valuation.

The investment made by Bain Capital Ventures, Battery Ventures, Lightspeed Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, Salesforce Ventures, and a sovereign wealth fund also includes the appointment of Marcus Ryu, CEO and co-founder of Guidewire Software, to BloomReach's board.

Today about 250 employees support clients worldwide. The funding will help the company to expand on the number of employees, grow globally, and continue to build out its platforms for a variety of uses.

SendGrid, a marketing and transnational email platform, uses BloomReach Compass to improve marketing and better understand what site visitors want, rather than merchandising, which is the original intent, says Joelle Kaufman, head of marketing and partners at BloomReach. 

BloomReach brought attention to its products because of their versatility and by helping companies attract more consumer visits and conversions on their Web sites by personalizing content in and messages in site search and navigation, as well as marketing and merchandising analytics.

The company published a report late last year estimating that 44% of consumers begin product searches on Amazon -- far more than on search engines like Google, Bing or Yahoo, or on retail sites -- suggesting that personalization is the key to Amazon's success.

PacSun uses about three BloomReach platforms to help site visitors sort through the thousands of products on about two million pages on the retailer's Web site. Nathan Liu, PacSun VP for e-commerce, believes it can become quite a challenge for shoppers to find exactly what they want.

While the majority of the nearly $5 trillion in U.S. retail sales occur in stores, eMarketer estimates that in 2015 retail ecommerce accounted for 7.1%. Online's share by 2019 will reach 9.8%.