Venture Capital Blog on Ulitzer

Conductor, Inc, a pioneer of enterprise SEO measurement and optimization solutions, today announced $10 million in Series B funding, led by new investor Matrix Partners. FirstMark Capital, who led Conductor's Series A financing, also participated in the round.

Conductor is the industry leader in developing products and solutions designed to address the largely untapped natural search market. Given the industry's lack of dependable data and intelligent tools, enterprise marketers frequently neglect the significant opportunities in natural search -- investing only 11 percent of their search marketing budget, despite the fact that nearly 85 percent of all search activity occurs in the natural space. Conductor's technology empowers online marketing professionals to gather reliable data on their SEO efforts, make better decisions on capturing search market share, and accurately measure the ROI of these efforts.

"We see persistent demand from large organizations to invest in SEO. However, lacking the tools to manage and measure that investment, many large organizations are effectively inactive in natural search and miss out on significant opportunities to grow their businesses," said Nick Beim, a General Partner with Matrix Partners. "Conductor has demonstrated considerable success in improving the metrics and transparency of natural search."

"Matrix and FirstMark bring important industry expertise, support and extensive networks that will enable Conductor to continue giving our customers insight into their natural search efforts," said Seth Besmertnik, CEO of Conductor. "We look forward to continuously adding significant value to our customers by closing the loop for their natural search marketing efforts."

In addition to expanding its client roster and product offerings, Conductor has added experienced senior management and staff from major search engines, software as a service (SaaS) providers, and the SEO/SEM industry over the past year.

About Matrix Partners
Matrix Partners is a venture capital firm focused on early stage investments in the communications, consumer Internet, mobile, semiconductor, and software sectors. The firm emphasizes long-term relationships with world-class entrepreneurs. Founded in 1977, Matrix Partners ranks among the industry's top-performing venture capital firms. Prior portfolio companies include Apple, JBoss, OpenWave, SanDisk, Sycamore Networks, and Veritas. The firm manages over $2.5 billion in assets from its offices in Boston, Silicon Valley, Beijing, and India. For more information see http://www.matrixpartners.com.

About FirstMark Capital
Based in New York City, FirstMark Capital has established itself as a venture leader with a strong, national reach over its thirteen year history. FirstMark invests in companies that are creating new markets with innovative technology solutions or rethinking existing markets by applying a novel business model. With nearly $2 billion in capital commitments, FirstMark's team of investment and operations professionals have decades of real-world experience and leadership in core technology markets, making the firm uniquely qualified to offer industry insight, relationships and the operational expertise to build lasting businesses. Select historical investments include: Netgear, Inc. (NASDAQ: NTGR); First Advantage Corp. (NASDAQ: FADV); StubHub, Inc (Acquired by eBay, Inc.); Netegrity, Inc. (Acquired by CA Inc); Flarion, Inc. (Acquired by Qualcomm, Inc.); OutlookSoft Inc. (Acquired by SAP AG); Analex Corp. (Acquired by QinetiQ); Vallent (Acquired by IBM); Syndesis (Acquired by Subex) and Navic (Acquired by Microsoft). For more information, please visit www.firstmarkcap.com.

About Conductor, Inc.
Conductor is a leading provider of SEO measurement and optimization solutions, empowering enterprise marketers to manage and improve their SEO efforts. Conductor's subscription-based, software as a service platform enables customers to gather competitive data, prioritize and improve their decision making, and accurately measure the ROI of their SEO efforts. Conductor also offers a range of associated professional services to its over 200 Fortune 500 and Internet Retailer 500 clients, a majority of the leading interactive agencies, and some of the world's most prestigious publications. Based in Chelsea, Manhattan, the company was founded in 2005, and is one of the fastest growing companies in New York. For more information, please visit www.conductor.com