Enterprise cloud provider Brandcast has closed a Series A-1 round of funding with $18m (£13.7m) in new investment that will be used to accelerate the growth of its technology platform. The round was co-led by TPG Growth-backed Affinity Group, Marc Benioff and Shasta Ventures.

Brandcast provides firms with a cloud-based platform for creating and managing large portfolios of enterprise-grade websites, and has clients in markets including financial services, healthcare, commercial real estate, insurance, food and beverages and more.

“One of the core objectives of digital transformation is to revolutionise the customer journey,” said Richard Yanowitch, chairman and CEO of Brandcast. “The new customer journey is entirely mobile and web-based and consists of unique digital experiences at every stage of customer engagement.

“These new customer experiences must be visually stinning, highly interactive, brand-forward, and readily personalised. The only way to achieve this at scale is with a radically new technology architecture – hence the Brandcast Website Cloud for Enterprise. We are thrilled to have Affinity Group join us on our journey. With hundreds of major brands and deep operational expertise, Affinity Group will help Brandcast rapidly scale our business and platform adoption.”

The firms platform aims to consolidate the entire website workflow from design, content creation and editing to hosting, management and analytics, all on a single collaborative system that can scale to large numbers. The platform is code-free and run by marketers, with the objective of freeing-up developer and IT resources from website design and production.

“TPG Growth and Affinity Group selectively invests in transformative marketing and communications companies,” said Bill McGlashan, CEO of TPG Group. “Marc (Benioff) is someone Ive known and worked with for some time. He is a visionary for enterprise solutions designed to help companies connect with customers. We believe Brandcast addresses a critical digital marketing challenge facing many organisations.”