MindTouch raises $12 million, aims to expand

MindTouch, which provides optimization for help and customer product content, said it has raised $12 million in its first round of outside funding from PeakSpan Capital, SK Ventures and SAP.

The startup, which to date was bootstrapped by founders Steve Bjorg and Aaron Fulkerson, said it will use the funds to develop its products, build out its marketing, sales and engineering teams and integrate with partners Salesforce, SAP and Zendesk.

In a nutshell, MindTouch aims to unify content to get customers answers faster whether they come in via phone, search or a store location. Often customers have to navigate everything from user guides to reviews to FAQs and knowledge bases.

MindTouch counts Whirlpool, MakerBot, Remington and Docker as customers. The concept behind MindTouch is interesting given that it aims to turn product content into selling assets. According to MindTouch's Fulkerson, help content can be used as a customer engagement tool.

In a post to customers, Fulkerson said that MindTouch had buyout offers, but decided to scale the company. He added:

Now that we have all this cash in the bank what will we do with it? Primarily we'll be investing in spreading the word. I want to shake every company by the shoulders and make them understand the opportunity they're missing. Prior to 2015 all our clients came to us. We did zero outbound marketing and sales. Companies would learn about MindTouch usually because a competitor was using MindTouch and it was disrupting how they did business. We intend to invest in helping more companies realize their potential by getting the word out about this new kind of content driven customer engagement. We are super passionate about this. Companies are already spending money on this content. We want them to activate it for their buyers and customers.

Related: Five minutes with: Aaron Fulkerson, CEO, MindTouch | MindTouch taps machine learning to put customer service on the offensive