Updating marketing materials and client reports can be a tedious, time consuming job. One fintech firm—Seismic—is harnessing technology to streamline the process.
Company: Seismic
Location: San Diego and Boston
Website: www.seismic.com
Sector: Institutional investment
Year Formed: 2010
No. of Employees: 80
Stage: Series B
Notable Investors: JMI Equity and Sigma West
Pitch: An automation system that allows financial services firms’ marketing and sales teams to deliver a world-class client experiences by delivering the right content at the right time on any device.
Tell us a bit about your company and what it does?
Seismic’s software platform is used by marketing and client reporting teams to eliminate the time-consuming, manual, and error-prone steps in updating their marketing materials. Seismic also provides relationship managers with easy access to fully updated, compliant and personalized pitch books, fact sheets, client review materials with a cloud-based, mobile-friendly platform that lets them minimize preparation time and maximize the time they can spend in the field with clients and prospects.
As an example, the marketing and client reporting teams at a Fortune 100 asset management firm use Seismic to streamline their quarterly update process, and increase their efficiency in producing pitch books, client reviews and other materials.
By automating the previously manual update process, the marketing team was able to deliver client review presentations to relationship managers only eight business days after the end of the quarter, compared to the 20 business days it took previously. This faster turnaround resulted in eight weeks of additional selling time in the field for this firm’s relationship managers.
How is Seismic different than other companies in the same space?
Seismic’s unique product differentiator is its LiveDoc feature, which connects any internal and external data source to a document, allowing the document to be automatically updated with the latest graphs, charts, facts and figures each time the document is opened. The result is pitch books that assemble themselves and client materials that are never out of compliance.
We are unaware of a company that automates any document type and provides a content management platform for distributing it to relationship managers in the field in a fully secure, compliant way. The unique nature of our offering and the large ROI marketing teams experience by using Seismic are two of the main reasons we have been experiencing rapid growth with institutional asset management firms.
What is your revenue model? How will the company make money?
Seismic has an annual subscription SaaS revenue model. Licenses are based on role (marketing or sales). We also offer ongoing fee-based support to clients, if they so choose (not required to be successful).
Who is your target market? How big is the opportunity?
Our target marketing is all institutional asset management (including hedge funds, mutual funds, ETF sponsors, and more) and wealth management firms with >$10B of AUM, of which there are approximately 975 firms in the U.S. Also, outside of the financial services space, diligence efforts suggest $600M of annual revenue in this space by 2020.
Why are you and your team capable of succeeding?
Seismic’s founding team has over 11 years of experience working together and solving problems for financial service firms, where an in-depth understanding of data, compliance and technology are needed to remain cutting-edge.
Prior to founding Seismic, the founding team played central roles in driving the rapid growth of Document Sciences Corp. (NASDAQ: DOCX), leading to its acquisition by EMC in 2008.
What is your company’s next target/milestone?
Seismic has experienced 150% annual revenue growth each year for the past 3 years. To maintain this pace of growth, the headcount of the company has doubled each year. Our Boston office is moving to a space six times larger than our current location in May 2015. We have also begun to expand into markets outside of North America this year, with expansion efforts in Australia / NZ and Europe underway.
Can you tell us one unusual fact about your company?
Seismic’s Boston location has an official office dog named after the company. Mic (short for Seismic) is a Shiba Inu who comes to work every day and makes sure the Boston crew stays in line.