Monetate wants to tap Phila. area for its hiring

Actually, as CEO of Monetate, which announced today that it has landed $5.1 million in venture capital, he’s a man on several missions. But one is predominant.

“I think that above all else, I’m really thinking about how we grow the right team,” Brussin said when I talked to him about the funding on Friday.

Brussin’s team has some room to grow. As I said in the brief item I wrote about the funding earlier today, Monetate plans to expand its staff from 30 to 50 in the next couple months

Brussin thinks the area has the people Monetate needs to fill its open positions and he’s interacting with the region’s information-technology community to find them.

To that end, the company is accepting referrals, as well as applications, on its website. Anyone whose referral gets hired by Monetate gets $500 or an iPad.

“We’re really hoping to do more and more things like that to make sure that everyone knows that Monetate is looking for the right people,” Brussin said. “It’s really important to us that we do our growth here in Philadelphia.”

Monetate plans to do its immediate growth in its current office space, which Brussin said it took with the knowledge that it was going to be hiring more people. Eventually, he said, Monetate will need additional space, but even if that forces it to move, it will stay close to its current headquarters in the Four Falls Corporate Center in West Conshohocken.

Monetate has been in that building since its inception. It initially occupied space in the office of First Round Capital, which provided it with seed funding and co-led its current round.

Even though Monetate has gotten two rounds of seed funding since Brussin and David Bookspan funded it in 2008, it and its investors consider the latest round to be its first, or Series A, round of venture capital.

“This is officially our Series A but unlike what Series A typically means, this is a company that is in its third holiday season with big customers and has a real track record and a lot of success,” Brussin said. “This is just the first time that we’ve put the Series A badge on our fund raising.”

Monetate’s technology enables operators of e-commerce websites to serve up different views of their sites, including views with different promotions, to visitors to the sites, based on such things as the visitors’ locations and purchase histories. It also enables e-commerce website operators to test ad campaigns and promotions as they run them.

“Our favorite Monetate feature is the ability that Monetate gives us to insert content seamlessly, anywhere on our site without having to modify our page templates,” Alex Miller, QVC’s vice president of eCommerce and eMarketing, was quoted as saying in the press release Monetate put out about its funding.