Australia's Autopilot raises $7m round

Set up in 2012 in by brothers Mike, Chris, and Peter Sharkey, Autopilot offers marketing automation services across email, text, and post.

Rather than compete with a company like Salesforce - which has a cloud-based customer relationship management platform as its core product - Autopilot says it is targeting the 96% of companies that do not already use marketing automation services.

"Our strategy will continue to be to make marketing automation accessible for all," said Mike Sharkey, CEO of Autopilot, in a statement. "We are investing in our ecosystem with an API that allows you to connect to all the applications, services and channels you use in your business."

The company is understood to have raised about $20 million so far. Sharkey told Business Insider that the firm secured its seed round in 2012 after he deliberately tried to get turned down for funding so that he could apply for an Australian government program that only backed start-ups rejected by VCs.

"I wrote arrogant emails to the two major investment companies in Australia, saying ‘I'm going to build the biggest company ever," he said, but to his "disappointment" they wanted to see the product. "They became really interested and said we'd like to put in some money."

The company - which has since relocated it headquarters to the US - went on to raise $10 million in May last year. This latest capital injection will be used to further develop the platform, grow the user-base, and add extra staff.

To appeal to a broader section of the market, Autopilot plans to launch an online training resource called Flight School, which includes courses, workflow plans, best practice guidelines, and shareable content. According to research firm IDC, the marketing software space is expected to grow to $32 billion by 2018.

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• Topics
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• Early-stage
• Australia
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