Octane11 — Powering Connected Data for B2B Enterprises

Explosive Growth in Demand for Better Data Harnessing

How much is a quintillion bytes? It is hard to grasp the sheer size, but companies produce more than 2 quintillion bytes of data a day…in just one single day! And that volume of data is expected to grow by another 42% per year over the next few years. Is it any surprise that enterprise marketers often feel lost in the data tsunami?

Data has long been preached as “the holy grail,” but actually harnessing data is a multi-dimensional challenge. It requires ingestion, storage, cleaning, standardization, enrichment, and aggregation to allow businesses to use that data to drive impact. Achieving accurate, timely, and connected “business intelligence” has been a core priority for enterprises for decades, but even today, it remains a core pain point. This is especially true for B2B marketers, who need to influence complex purchase cycles across multiple decision-makers — something that standard data tools simply don’t support.

The ongoing business intelligence pain point is a byproduct of continuous innovation in the data management stacks. We now have powerful data warehouse tools like Snowflake that are enabling companies to store more data than ever before. We also have tools like dbt Labs that are helping experienced data specialists transform that data into useable structures. But using these systems require a whole new level of technical chops. And that’s why businesses in the US are now spending more than $11B per year employing high-priced data analysts and scientists to do the job.

This massive expense in hiring and ramping productive data scientists (with typical salaries of ~$150K/year) has now created an urgent problem for enterprises — how to manage their data stack without exploding personnel costs. This is a particular issue for B2B marketing teams where data is collected across a wide range of touchpoints like ads, SEO, email, social, events, chat, and more, all with the goal of understanding the user journey across marketing campaigns. B2B marketers are now using more than 22 marketing technology tools on average, many of which are designed to target individual consumers rather than business decision makers, making the data support needs of B2B marketers particularly complex.

The Opportunity

Urgent pain points warrant innovative solutions and that’s why we at Javelin were very excited when we came across Octane11. Octane11 is a B2B-focused data integration, enrichment, and insights platform intended to turn the exploding volume of data being captured across the enterprise into truly actionable insights, without the need to hire expensive in-house data specialists. The starting focus for Octane11 is on connecting silos of information in B2B marketing activities: the company provides CMOs with high visibility across their entire marketing stack, across every tool, and every marketing tactic.

To deliver the best consolidated insights, Octane11 integrates with SaaS tools, data warehouses, and other third-party data systems that end customers already use, such as Google, HubSpot, LinkedIn, Demandbase, Marketo, Salesforce, and others. Post the ingestion and relevant transformation of third-party data, Octane11 layers on “Accounts” and “Topics” identifiers, its own proprietary first-party, B2B-specific data model to surface relevant insights and recommendations. A simple yet powerful example is the ability to link an online visitor to their company and associate them with a campaign to optimize a multi-party decision process for a complex sale. Octane11 is uniquely designed to draw those associations based on over a decade of research and experience in the marketing data transformation space.

To put it simply, Octane11’s ability to integrate, transform and visualize data removes the need for its B2B clients to have internal data ops/engineers parse through warehoused data. Octane11 does all of that processing so the customer can digest the resulting insights using Octane11’s out of the box dashboards or export the processed data to any other preferred BI tool.

Drivers of Value

When we met Octane11, we were impressed by the value it was already delivering to customers such as Amex, Enfusion, MediaMath, Cardlytics, and more. In a short timeline, Octane11 had garnered a broad customer list pursuing a multi-pronged distribution strategy — i) selling directly to CMOs/CROs at $100M+ enterprises and divisions of Fortune 500 companies, ii) selling via channel partners like agencies, consultants, media platforms, and data providers to help enhance their offerings to end customers, and iii) building a self-service, quick time-to-value tool to user communities as lead gen for a broader enterprise sale.

Octane11’s relatively quick early market adoption is driven by a few key factors:

i) Savings on Cost: Customers on average pay $120K annually for Octane11’s solution ($5–25K/month depending on the size of the enterprise), in lieu of needing to hire several internal data engineers who cost ~$150K per year or more.

ii) Time to Value: Set up time with Octane11 is as little as 1 week, versus 6 months to literally several years of ramp time for internal teams.

iii) Long-Term Upside: Customers benefit from continuous product upgrades on Octane11’s cloud-based solution, versus internal maintenance costs and the risk of potential team churn.

iv) Industry Insights: Perhaps the most compelling reason to use Octane11, is that by leveraging Octane11’s B2B-focused data model, clients can compare their results to industry benchmarks. This allows clients to not only understand their own fully-loaded ROI, but also see how their performance compare to industry peers and receive recommendations for improvement — which produces enhanced campaign performance and ultimately, a measurable increase in results.

Examples of Octane11’s impact on marketing efficiency include: an 86% reduction in reporting lag time, 58 employee hours saved per week, and 34% increase in account engagement visibility.

While there are several vertical or use-case specific BI tools in marketing technology (eg. reporting from “account-based marketing” ad platforms or reporting from specific tactics like email or social media tools), there is no leading solution in market today that looks to aggregate all B2B marketing activities across all different channels, to create a single user journey profile. We at Javelin believe Octane11’s ability to surface connected insights across different tools and across industry peers is highly differentiated — and that the platform can become the go-to-source for customers to answer key marketing ops/business questions such as:

— Are all my marketing tools working as expected?
— Are metrics within industry norms?
— Are we engaging target accounts?
— Which tactics have been most effective?
— Which accounts are at risk?
— Where can we drive more efficiency?
— What are the bottlenecks in our funnel?
— What is our true ROI now and going forward?
— Where should I spend (or cut) my next dollar of marketing investment?

Over time, Octane11 plans to become the go-to source for delivering aggregated insights on a wider range of siloed B2B enterprise data across not just marketing, but also sales, finance, business operations, product management, and more. We deem Octane11’s patent pending technology on its first-party data model for B2B marketing, its deep expertise in automated technology, and its comprehensive go-to-market channel approach as additional key differentiators.

Introducing Dan Rosenberg — the visionary behind Octane11

Octane11 was incubated as a company within MediaMath, a demand-side platform offering cross-exchange advertising management services. Dan Rosenberg, founder and CEO at Octane11, spent over eight years at MediaMath, first as SVP of Business & Corporate Development, and then as their Chief Strategy Officer and Chief Marketing Officer.

Having spent almost a decade at MediaMath, Dan experienced first-hand the problems marketers face in trying to understand a user journey across different marketing technologies and campaigns. He set out to solve this pain point for his clients and himself internally, and given the large market opportunity, eventually founded Octane11 as a standalone business.

Dan has an extensive career in marketing, finance, partnerships, and business development. Prior to MediaMath, Dan spent time in operations at Virgin Mobile, Rave Wireless, and HotJobs, and in finance at Maveron. ASIMCO and Jericho Capital. Dan has a B.A. in Government from Harvard University and an M.B.A from Harvard Business School. We could not imagine a more ideal industry veteran to be running Octane11.

Looking Ahead

The exponential growth of enterprise data is a paradigm shift that is here to stay and will only accelerate with the advent of 5G, IOT and AI. So is the shift in managing this data from on-premises to cloud data platforms. The rise of cloud platforms and associated transition of data to the cloud creates the pathway for companies like Octane11 to be able to provide fully integrated tooling and analytics to end customers.

B2B marketing data management is a massive industry and its growth exacerbates the need for associated data transformation and integration solutions. Data integration tools tend to capture a significant portion of the spend on data management infrastructure, and this percentage can get as high as 25%-30%, translating to $30-$40B of total market opportunity in Octane11’s target industry. While Octane11 is starting with a specific use case today, we are excited about the future broader platform play to connect siloed B2B data across the entire enterprise.

We are ecstatic to lead Octane11’s Seed round, and to partner with Dan and the Octane11 team on their company building journey for years to come!

— Tasnia Huque and Noah Doyle