Sentieo Eyes Recruitment Drive After Raising $19M Funding

San Francisco-based research platform provider Sentieo is planning a major expansion of its sales and marketing teams to accelerate the vendor’s growth, after raising $19 million in Series A funding.

Though Sentieo declined to disclose the specific amounts invested by participants, the majority of the $19 million comes from Palo Alto-based private equity firm Centana Growth Partners, with the remainder raised from 15 existing investors in the company.

“This puts us in a very firm footing from a financial perspective,” says Sentieo co-founder and CEO Alap Shah, adding that Centana are “long-term enterprise investors. They have experience of building enterprise sales teams.” Eric Byunn, partner at Centana, will join Sentieo’s board of directors as a result of the new investment.

This is a growth equity round. The reason for taking this capital now is to accelerate our growth,” Shah says. “Job one is growing our client base and getting our name out there more.”

In addition to continue growing its engineering and data science teams to make its artificial intelligence and machine-learning systems more competitive and automate more of analysts’ workflows, Shah says the single biggest area of spend will be on expanding its sales and marketing teams. For example, the vendor is looking to fill about 15 sales roles, ranging from junior account executives to senior sales management positions in New York, San Francisco and Chicago, and is seeking candidates to open a sales function in Europe, most likely based in London.

On the marketing side, Sentieo is looking to hire a chief marketing officer and a VP of digital marketing to build on the recent hire of former portfolio manager Nick Mazing to grow the vendor’s presence on Twitter. “Digital will be our main area of spend, but you’ll also see us using new channels,” Shah says.