• by Jess Nelson , November 11, 2016

Crayon announced a $3.35 million seed funding round on Thursday for artificial intelligence (AI)-powered marketing analytics, placing total funding to date at just over $5 million.

Founded in 2014 by marketing veterans of HubSpot and AbMob, Crayon is an AI marketing insights company that helps marketers and sales professionals track, manage and analyze data.

Crayon powers an all-in-one dashboard that tracks over 100 data categories, including pricing changes, messaging, product launches and online reviews. Staying up-to-date on internal organization data points is important to team members and helps to deliver competitive insights to like-minded companies in the competitive landscape.

Crayon already has over 42,000 users and has quadrupled the number of paid customers in the past four months, according to Jonah Lopin, the CEO and cofounder of Crayon. Notable new customers include Zendesk and Continuum Managed Services. 

Lopin asserts that Crayon tracks 2.3 million companies across 7.4 million domains and 117 million Web pages, analyzing over 500,000 data points each day.

This week’s seed funding round was led by Eric Paley, managing partner at Founder Collective, and Steve Anderson, founder of Baseline Ventures. Paley will also be joining Crayon’s board of directors as a result of the announcement.

In addition, BoxGroup and Converge Venture Partners also participated in the seed funding alongside angel investors Scott Belsky, founder of Behance; Mike Volpe, previous CMO of HubSpot; and Yoav Shapira, the previous VP of engineering at HubSpot.

"Marketers have never had a great way of understanding what's happening in their market -- who is running experiments, who is making moves, who are new entrants you should be watching," states Volpe in a press release announcing the news. "Crayon solves that problem for marketing teams in a really innovative way."

The additional resources will be leveraged to hire additional engineering, product, marketing and sales team members.