Emergence Capital Partners, a venture capital firm that nurtures companies using technology to provide business services, said Monday it led an $8-million investment in Goodmail Systems, a provider of email authentication services.

The funding will help Goodmail further develop its service and put it into operation, said CEO Richard Gingras.

Goodmail’s service is aimed at helping legitimate business emails avoid customers’ spam filters. It does this by encoding the messages in a way that allows an Internet service provider or web-based email provider to recognize them. It then places the messages in consumers’ inboxes with an icon showing that they are legitimate.

“The targeted customers are the large number of legitimate enterprises who are struggling today to take advantage of an email environment which has obviously suffered quite a bit of damage,” said Mr. Gingras. “The damage they see is the lack of reliable delivery” as well as the loss of customer trust, he added.

Mr. Gingras believes the potential market for Goodmail’s services is vast.

“If all commercial messages today used certified email, we would be looking at an addressable market of close to $2 billion,” he said. “That will grow to some $3.5 billion to $4 billion per year over the next four years.”

The Goodmail investment, which was co-led by Doll Capital Management, is the sixth for Emergence Capital from a $125-million fund it raised last August. DCM Managing General Partner David Chao is also a member of Red Herring’s board.

‘Technology-Enabled Services’

Emergence Capital, founded last year by entrepreneur Gordon Ritter and venture capitalists Jason Green and Brian Jacobs, looks for companies that provide what its founders call “technology-enabled services.”

“We’re the only firm we know of that’s 100 percent focused in this category,” said Mr. Green. “The way we define it is essentially technology companies that have a service business model, that have recurring revenues, and that use proprietary technology and processes to scale rapidly.”

Companies Emergence Capital is interested in tend to echo the on-demand business model, in which customers buy computing resources such as processing power and software-based services on an as-needed basis instead of purchasing expensive systems that may go unused part of the time.

To help identify such companies, the firm has assembled an advisory board of on-demand experts from companies such as IBM and Oracle.

Among the fund’s other investments are SuccessFactors, which provides on-demand software that helps companies track and manage employee performance; Adapt Technologies, which offers services to help companies make their keyword-search marketing more effective; and Visage Mobile, which allows non-cell phone providers such as ESPN to offer branded cell phone service.