StoryChief founders Valeri Potchekailov, Gregory Claeyssens, and Brik De Maeyer | Image credit: StoryChief
Ghent-based StoryChief, a content marketing automation software, announced that it has raised €3.4M in a fresh round of funding. The round was led by Capricorn Partners via their Capricorn Digital Growth Fund.
Existing investors Peak Capital, Anthony De Clerck, Pieter Casneuf, Johan Van Damme, and Willem Delbare also participated in this round. StoryChief’s founders, Valeri Potchekailov, Brik De Maeyer, and Gregory Claeyssens, also joined in on this round. Vlaio also provided a grant to make StoryChief smarter with an AI layer on top of their existing product.
Steven Lambert, investment director at Capricorn, says, “StoryChief is the first mover in the next generation of smart marketing platforms which will not only replace point solutions but also cover the entire content life cycle in a smart way.”
Prior to this round, StoryChief raised €1.1M in January 2020, led by Amsterdam-based VC firm Peak Capital.
David Zwagemaker, partner at Peak Capital, says, “We’re excited to continue backing StoryChief by co-investing with Capricorn Partners so StoryChief can continue to strengthen its content suite and become a category leader.”
Capital utilisation
StoryChief says it is on a mission to help its customers develop via content and take on more complex content marketing challenges in the business sector. With thousands of users across 65 countries, StoryChief claims to have been scalable.
With the raised funding, the startup says it will accelerate its international growth and enable innovation in its platform’s machine learning and AI capabilities.
How was StoryChief born?
According to the startup, content marketing can have a significant influence on an organisation’s success. The issue for the majority of businesses is that decentralised cooperation, distribution, and measuring systems make work very tiring and tedious.
Examples include copying and pasting content into numerous content management systems, using various tools to optimise content for search engines, not having the time to adapt the content to all the various social media channels, and sending multiple Word documents, screenshots, or Google Doc links back and forth via email. If continued in this manner, one can soon find themselves in a mess.
The founders of StoryChief experienced this during their 5 years as a marketing agency, and in 2017, StoryChief was born. The company is on a mission to solve these challenges.
StoryChief helps agencies and marketing teams manage their content life cycle in one place. This includes planning, briefing, multi-channel optimisation, approval, publishing, and analytics. The startup claims to increase its customer’s digital footprint, bring in new leads, and increase sales.
Besides, the Belgium-based startup is also easing the cooperation and content posting procedures as well as enhancing its data engine to help businesses and marketing agencies in making better choices regarding digital communication.
Co-founder Valeri Potchekailov says, “We see more and more demand coming from larger international marketing teams. Often they work in silos where it is harder for them to stay aligned on external communication. StoryChief breaks that barrier and helps, for example, a marketing lead from Italy easily pick up corporate news from the UK and adjust the message to their local market.”
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