Like their peers in the consumer market, business-to-business companies increasingly rely on online ads as part of their marketing efforts. The difference is that they try to  a narrower group of users with authority to make purchases on behalf of their firms, which requires more fine-grained audience visibility than what traditional outreach tools offer.

Demandbase Inc. is one of the providers working to meet this requirement. The company today secured $65 million in funding from a group of investors led by Connecticut-based private equity firm Sageview Capital. The cash will go toward widening the adoption of its account-based marketing toolkit, which serves as a central hub for coordinating business-facing sales activities.

At the core of the platform is an advertising tool that promises to help companies place promotions on the websites and other mediums where they can best reach the intended audience. According to Demandbase, the feature provides the ability target specific individuals at the firms on an organization’s lead list.

When a user accesses a company’s website through an ad, the service checks their IP address against an internal database to determine if they’re working for a firm of interest. The algorithms under the hood also analyze what pages they check, how long they stay and other key factors to create a profile of their activities. Marketers can use the information to trigger personalized promotions based on each user’s inferred interests.

Demandbase recently augmented its platform with an artificial intelligence tool that makes it possible to go even further by mixing in information from external source. A user could, for example, check what type of articles a lead reads on LinkedIn and customize their sales email accordingly to stand out from the pack.

Demandbase claims to have seen revenues more than quadruple over the past three years on the back of strong enterprise adoption. The startup’s platform is particularly popular in the tech industry, where it’s used by Dell Technologies Inc., Adobe Systems Inc., Oracle Corp. and other major players.

Image: Demandbase