Many consumer marketing campaigns throw out vast nets, hoping to lure qualified customer prospects.
Business-to-business outreach, on the other hand, is more like fishing with a spear. There’s a specific target in mind. Your focus must be sharp.
That’s the analogy used by Jon Miller, co-founder of soon-to-be private marketing automation company Marketo (MKTO), to describe the software being sold by his latest venture, Engagio. (If the name sounds familiar, it’s because it was previously used by a software company working on an app for managing social conversations, since acquired by Influitive.)
Engagio, founded about 18 months ago, on Tuesday disclosed a $22 million Series B funding infusion led by Norwest Ventures. The new round also includes FirstMark Capital (which led Engagio’s $10 million Series A) and Storm Ventures (one of the firms behind Marketo). Miller isn’t disclosing the valuation.
Engagio sells software to marketers responsible for managing interactions with customer prospects within specific target accounts—the buzzword often used is “account-based marketing.” Many of Engagio’s early customers—it has approximately 50 on board so far—come from the high-tech industry, including business software companies like Guidewire, Hearsay Social, Hortonworks (HDP), New Relic, and VMware (VMW).
Two other long-time Marketo executives are on board at Engagio: Ray Carroll, vice president of sales, who helped grow Marketo’s annual recurring revenue to $250 million over the past seven years; and Glen Lipka, who was previously Marketo’s chief design officer, and now leads interface development strategy for Engagio.
The new financing will be used mainly to scale the 20-something-person company’s sales and marketing operations, Miller said.
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How big is this opportunity? Aside from its early beachhead among high-tech companies, Engagio is targeting manufacturers and financial services firms that predominantly sell their products to other businesses. According to Forrester Research, marketing automation technology is a small but growing part of business-to-business marketers’ budgets.