[ibimage==35969==Original==none==self==null]
Nearly two years after elicit closed its $1.5 million Series A round with names like Greycroft on the dotted line, the search software company opened the round back up to make room for an investment from Chicago Ventures last week.
This is significant for a few reasons: the first (obviously) being more cash equals faster growth for the three-year-old company which was co-founded by Eric and Adam Heneghan. The brothers said they hope to bring on board some talented people who are “waiting in the wings” from the last two Chicago companies they founded (Elevation and Giant Step). They will beef up elicit's sales, creative and development teams to push forward elicit's technology, which gives marketers control over a site's often underutilized search bar.
This fresh Series A boost isn't just important for elicit as a company, it is meaningful because it’s strengthening the Chicago tech ecosystem as well. The elicit team has known Kevin Willer and Staurt Larkins of Chicago Ventures for decades - but now Chicago Ventures is officially involving elicit in the local scene (Eric Heneghan admitted he’s been missing out it on lately because he's been working so hard).
“We love Chicago; we’ve been here since the beginning of digital,” Heneghan said. “At my previous companies I used to have some frustrations, but I’m glad to see there is a tech community here now. We’ve had our heads down, working, during this advent. Now we are reconnected with this new community and suddenly plugged in to all these people.”
For example, another one of Chicago Ventures’ local portfolio companies, Opternative, reached out to Heneghan last week after the announcement, welcoming elicit to the family because the two companies were essentially “siblings” now. This interaction wouldn't have happened in the 90s when the brothers founded their first Chicago company, Heneghan said.
Having the support of the Chicago tech community will come in handy as elicit looks to push even more boundaries. Elicit will soon be making moves to impact the search results page, not just the search box (Heneghan said he is tired of blue links on results pages). The elicit team also has its hands in the data surrounding search: this data not only is important for marketers to see in real-time, but also comes in handy for content strategists (because if users search repeatedly for the same thing, it means the content isn’t giving users what they want).
In Heneghan's terms, these real-time stats are “very explicit signals” given directly by users. Brands are missing out on essential user data if they ignore them. So far some pretty big brands like Xerox, Whirlpool, Goodyear, Time Warner Cable, Bank of America and BlackBerry agree with Heneghan: not using elicit would be a big mistake.
Image: "Searching for idea" from Shutterstock
