Content automation platform Turtl raises $17M to make business materials more engaging

Turtl, a content automation platform based in London, today announced that it closed a $17 million series A financing round led by Octopus Ventures. Cofounder and CEO Nick Mason says that the capital will be put toward expanding Turtl’s accounts team and establishing a Boston-based headquarters, as well as expanding the company’s marketing and sales efforts.

There’s a growing desire across the enterprise to scale, personalize, and automate marketing, sales, and post-sales and customer activity tasks. According to Lumen Research, 70% of business-to-business marketers plan to increase their spend on content creation in 2021. Moreover, organizations report having moved away from relying on event marketing, with the bulk choosing to prioritize areas like content marketing, sales enablement, and personalization instead.

Turtl was conceived in 2014 by founders Mason and Mark Sallows, who were working as consultants on a research management project at the University of Oxford. From casual conversations with resident psych professors at the college, Mason and Swallows says, they were inspired to develop new ways to present business ideas and messages.

“So much content goes against the core principles of how we absorb and remember information, to the detriment of how readers engage with it. Therein lay the seed of Turtl,” Mason told VentureBeat via email. “The content space has tools that compete with parts of what Turtl does; they are largely either automated and fast but not design-quality or they are designer-led and therefore slower and less automated … At the moment, no other business is able to offer the end-to-end solution in the way that Turtl can. Being able to offer everything from the design right through to integrations, personalisation, automation and analytics allow us to make Turtl so much more powerful.”

Automating content

Turtl enables enterprises to personalize interactive content, making business materials ostensibly easier to create, read, and analyze. The platform transforms brochures, sales decks, staff newsletters, and account-based marketing campaigns, integrating with existing tools from Salesforce, Marketo, Domo, and more.

In a recent HubSpot survey, over 20% of marketers said that they believe that personalization can improve sales engagement. And 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase when brands offer tailored experiences, according to Epsilon.

Turtl claims to have thousands of users and a global customer base of more than 200 companies spanning the European Union, North America, Africa, and Asia, including brands like Nestle and Cisco. Revenue has grown 70% in the last few months “with almost no cash burn,” the company says, with 60% of revenue coming from U.S.-based brands.

“We’ve seen a lot more investment in digital content and automation across the buyer journey during the pandemic. This is largely driven by the need for business-to-business companies to better identify, develop, and nurture relationships in a digital world,” Mason added. “Workforces are isolated, siloed, and decentralized, so we are more reliant on effective digital communication than ever before.”

The series A is 88-employee Turtl’s first institutional raise. With it, Mason expects that the startup will expand its headcount to 110 by the end of the year.