Predictive marketing SaaS company EverString has raised $65 million in venture funding for market expansion. The Series B investment round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, which gathered extra financial support from Sequoia Capital and IDG Ventures and brought in new investors including Lakestar.

EverString uses data science, artificial intelligence and predictive analytics in a cloud based system that helps B2B companies identify their best customer prospects. The system intelligently scores new and existing sales prospects and widens the net to find completely new targets. In ‘demand generation’ circles this is called going outside the funnel. EverString’s customers are primarily enterprise and mid-market companies and include Comcast Business, IBM, Hortonworks, Apttus and Zenefits.

It has also unveiled its latest service, EverString Predictive Ad Targeting, which it claims gives ‘demand generators’ more control over the top of their funnel.

While the marketing technology sector has grown significantly in recent years, few companies offer more than just niche, point solutions, said venture capitalist and market watcher Peter Nieh, partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. “EverString is unique as it offers a comprehensive platform that helps B2B companies find and drive the best customer prospects through the sales funnel,” said Nieh.

Most marketing officers struggle to prioritise their efforts efficiently, according to the Chief Marketing Officer Council which said 67 per cent of CMOs believe this ‘essential’ function is wasted because they can’t manage multiple systems. EverString impressed stakeholders because it bypasses the heavy integration cycles usually associated with combining several new systems and builds on the limitations of old-school demand generation methods.

Predictive marketing works by identifying the ideal audience then applying models of customers to map out the expected prospect-to-customer journey. EverString Audience Selection then allows the sellers to analyse and validate their entire addressable market of prospects, and then proactively target the ideal audience. These predictions are based on the wisdom compiled in a database of 20,000 external signals combined with data from internal CRM and marketing automation systems.