First the connections.
 
Russ Mann and Voyager’s Erik Benson attended Harvard Business School together and moved to Seattle to begin their post-MBA careers. Erik went to a startup briefly before joining Voyager Capital in 1998. Russ joined Seattle-based ONYX Software to work for founder and CEO Brent Frei. Prior to ONYX Software’s IPO, Russ left to pursue executive roles in Southern California.
 
Fast forward to March 2006. Russ had left H-P after the Peregrine acquisition and had joined the board of directors of San Diego-based Silicon Space, an IT services company. The owners of Silicon Space convinced Russ to spin-out one of the software products they had developed called SEMdirector into a separate company. Russ recognized that he could bring his CRM and analytics experiences, and his former team members, from ONYX and HNC to build a company in the emerging interactive marketing analytics market.
 
Combined with the generational change occurring in the CMO roles of global corporations and the changing role of advertising agencies in digital marketing, Russ believed there would be a "system of truth" opportunity to help marketers better understand and calibrate their spending in all forms of interactive marketing, from search and display marketing, to social media and mobile.
 
After spinning out the SEMdirector product from Silicon Space and forming Covario, Russ first recruited a management team from the executives he worked with at HNC, Fair Isaac and Peregrine. He then approached Jim Wu at Dubilier & Co. and Erik Benson at Voyager Capital for Covario’s first round of venture capital funding in late 2006.
 
Voyager Capital looked at the opportunity to invest in Covario through the same lens that they used to invest originally in Avenue A in 1999 which subsequently became aQuantive (acquired in 2007 by Microsoft for $6.4 billion). Avenue A had built the first ROI-based online display ad server focused on the demand-side. Competitor DoubleClick (since acquired by Google) was focused on serving publishers.  Similarly, Covario had built the first ROI-based Interactive Marketing Analytics software-as-a-service platform that provided broad advertising analytics to the demand-side.

 

Why It's Working
Russ understood that as a first time entrepreneur and CEO, Covario's success would depend on not only a strong business concept and technology, but also on experienced investors to help guide the company through the competitive online marketing industry. Voyager's investment team had helped guide aQuantive from startup, through an IPO, and beyond, and intuitively understood the building blocks that would be required to help Covario rise above the noise.
 
Through Voyager's active board participation, Covario has received high-level introductions to over 20 customers and strategic partners, helping to proactively develop an ecosystem around the interactive marketing analytics category. One of Voyager ‘s advisors, Keith Krach, joined the company’s board of directors together with Voyager’s managing director Erik Benson. Voyager’s venture partners Chrismon Nofsinger, Bruce Chizen, and Tom Kippola have been engaged at several points in the company’s development to advise Russ on proactive ecosystem planning (PEP), high performance team building (HPT) and go-to-market strategy formation (GTM).
 
From its spin-out formation in March 2006 to today, Covario has built a thriving company focused on leading the interactive marketing analytics industry with over 80 employees and $20 million in revenues in 2009. Covario is off to a great start under Russ Mann's leadership!