Claravine, a self-described marketing data platform, today announced that it raised $16 million in a Series B round led by Five Elms Capital with participation from Grayhawk Capital, Next Frontier Capital, Peninsula Ventures, Kickstart Fund, and Silverton Partners. CEO Verl Allen says that the new money, which brings the company's total raised to $27.9 million, will be used to double Claravine's headcount to 88 employees by the end of the yea and support product R&D.

Claravine was founded in 2012 as Tracking First, a company focused on streamlining the tracking code process for large organizations. Tracking code is a snippet of code that tracks the activity of a website visitor by collecting data and sending it to an analytics module, usually for marketing purposes.

According to Allen, Tracking First had "gritty founders" who "knew the space well" and had "high-quality" customers, but the focus was too narrow. "There was a realization that there was a bigger underlying problem that was being ignored in the market, which our solution had the potential to address," Allen told TechCrunch in an email interview. "In 2018, I joined as CEO and helped the organization -- now Claravine -- to grow and expand the ways we could help the largest organizations in the world take a proactive approach to their data."

Claravine's product is designed to help enterprises control what flows through their tech stack, especially business intelligence and analytics software, and manage their marketing data standards -- the blueprints for defining common formats for data across regions, teams, and campaigns. Via an API and integrations with platforms including Adobe Experience Manager and Workfront as well as media platforms like Google Ads, Claravine supports teams in managing parameters of these standards over time.

"[F]or many organizations, decision-makers have to rely on untrustworthy data for business decisions ... [These] decision-makers rely not just on technologies and data but humans, and that creates a large possibility for error in the data entry process, exacerbated by all the disconnected technologies and teams," Allen said. "This is why our solution is built to engrain standards into the way business teams work and collaborate as they create and modify data. By facilitating a common understanding of standards as inputs are generated and reviewed, organizations have greater control early on, whatever their needs. And downstream data users can move with more confidence and speed when using this data to make decisions."