Introducing Inflection.io: B2B Marketing Automation for Product-Led Companies, And Announcing Our Seed Round

I’m excited to announce Inflection is out of stealth and shout from the rooftops that we’ve built B2B marketing automation for product-led companies and you can now request a live demo. The future of B2B marketing is product-led and at Inflection, we know this new end-user era requires innovative solutions that are purpose-built for product-led companies. Inflection puts product activity data at the center and optimizes for the scalability and extensibility demands of the modern product-led marketing team. 

We started on this journey almost a year and a half ago, and in that time: have grown to 20 employees strong, completed SOC 2 certification, spoken with over 100 marketing teams at product-led companies, and launched the #1 marketing community for product-led growth which now has nearly 800 members. 

Core to our long-term success is assembling the right team. Led by former Bizible, Marketo, and Adobe execs, Dave Rigotti, Aaron Bird, and Vic Davis, we had a front-row seat to the changing dynamics with the shift to the end-user era and the challenges current B2B marketing automation solutions have in pivoting to support the demands of product-led marketing.

In addition to announcing the public availability of Inflection, we’re announcing that we have raised an oversubscribed $5M seed round, bringing total investment to $6.3M. Our seed round was led by MHS Capital with participation from Version One, Cercano Management, and a stellar group of angel investors, including: Matt Heinz (CRO Amplitude, SVP Sales Marketo), Edward Unthank (CEO Etumos), Justin Gray (CEO LeadMD), Adam Schoenfeld (CEO Simply Measured, VP Strategy Drift), Ray Carroll (VP Sales Marketo, VP Sales Engagio), Brewster Stanislaw (VP Product Bizible, Marketo, CPO Demandbase), Patrick Thompson (CEO Iteratively, Dir. Product Amplitude), and many more.

Why Did We Build Inflection?

When talking to product-led marketers, I’m often asked “what does great product-led marketing look like?” Unlike marketing to support sales-led strategies that have been developing for decades, product-led philosophies, processes, and tools are still emerging. Few “standards” and best practices exist as many marketers are still defining the space. However, a few themes have emerged:

• Marketing is moving into the product more than ever before and needs to be connected to the product and leverage activity data, not just what’s in Salesforce.
• Marketing needs to own the full customer lifecycle and therefore needs to drive customer engagement and sales expansion through orchestrated campaigns, not just campaigns to prospects.
• Marketing needs to communicate with all users, not just a subset that fits in a legacy marketing automation solution.
• Marketing needs to move beyond personalization to contextualization, to drive product adoption, brand, and sales pipeline.

Marketing teams know addressing this shift is crucial to growth and building a sticky, loved product. Companies are investing a great deal of effort to get B2C or sales-led processes and tools to work for product-led strategy, unsuccessfully. Legacy vendors like Marketo have full access to CRM data, but often only have access to a subset of users and at best a very limited subset of product activity data. Conversely, B2C solutions like Customer.io or Iterable are built for marketing driven from product activity data, but lack B2B concepts and data such as CRM and accounts, which makes demand generation and supporting the sales-led aspects of marketing impossible.

We believe B2B product-led companies deserve a purpose-built solution to help them drive adoption, revenue expansion, and create delightful product engagements, so we built it.

‍How Is Inflection Different From Other B2B Marketing Automation Solutions?

Inflection is the only marketing automation solution built for B2B product-led companies.  Inflection unifies data across accounts, individuals, and product activity, giving marketing teams a single view of the customer and the ability to deliver highly contextualized messages to drive meaningful customer engagement, self-service revenue, more pipeline for sales, and brand affinity. Examples include:

Inflection is purposefully built to meet the demands of product-led companies, enabling tailored marketing campaigns across the customer lifecycle: 

• Single view of the customers: Native integrations to your product activity data and CRM allow us to stream all the data from the source, with Inflection’s unification engine combining product, people, and account data automatically.
• Contemporary backend infrastructure: Inflection was made for business at scale, from being able to support 100 million contacts and 1000s of product activity events to being built with exacting security standards like SOC 2.
• Scale for your marketing teams: Inflection was made with marketing users in mind with self-service functionality built-in to reduce dependencies on other teams.
• Usage-based pricing that works for product-led companies: We’ve designed pricing for companies with large contact databases and you only pay for contacts you actually email.

In addition to unlocking new marketing engagement capabilities, Inflection also helps marketing leaders be in a position to continue leading the business forward and increase their opportunity to own more in the organization by challenging the status quo by driving more pipeline through product engagement, by taking control of the customer lifecycle to support building brand affinity, and helping success to mitigate churn and grow accounts.

Early Thought Leaders Influencing Inflection

We are incredibly fortunate to work with some amazing design partners and thought leaders, who shaped the initial version of Inflection. Here’s what some of them have to say: 

‍
With this new round of funding, we’ve opened up new roles across India and the US, including Kochi, Chennai, Bengaluru, and Seattle. All are encouraged to apply, especially those from diverse backgrounds.

Finally, thank you to our design partners and customers for inspiring us to build Inflection! The future of B2B marketing is product-led and we are excited to be the marketing automation solution for the end-user era. Click here to request a demo of Inflection and tell us what you think.