By Sean Wolfe

Venture capitalists sunk another $10 million in a second round of financing into Genius, a company that provides software tools on-demand that allows salespeople to market directly to prospects.

The latest round brings the company’s total funding to $15.1 million.It last raised funds in November, 2005.Mohr Davidow Ventures led the round, along with prior investors Emergence Capital Partners, and Walden International.

The tools developed by the San Mateo software allow a sales person to send an email to a prospect, see when they open the email, and whether they visit the company’s Web site. Moreover, it allows the sales person to see what the prospect looks at when they visit the Web site, ostensibly to better enable the sales person to tailor their pitch.Beyond its capabilities, the company plans also to compete on price, by offering its services on an on-demand basis.

Besides Eloqua, a Toronto-based firmfounded in 1999, and backed by private equity firms JMI Equity and venture capital group Bay Partners, Genius will have to prove it can compete with other CRM giants like SAP and Oracle. To pull that off, the company has adopted the on-demand model, offering its services at $29 per user per month

“Typically, if you try to build a similar system that tracks particular emails to a Web site visit, you’d have spend about $100,000,” said David Thompson, Genius’ CEO

MDV partner Nancy Schoendorf, said she decided to invest because the company has accomplished two important milestones for any software development company, namely ease of use, combined with deep technology that would be difficult for a rival to brew up overnight.

“From a user perspective it looks very easy, but that can only be achieved through very sophisticated technology. As we started to understand that, we got pretty excited. I think other people can come along and claim they deliver the same benefits, but executing on those claims is another matter,” she said.

Mr. Thompson said the company was self-seeded to the tune of $300,000, and spent a year developing its technology.“I think what we’ve built is a disruptive approach to marketing and CRM,” he said. “We get deep behavioral data on what a customer is doing on the Web site.That used to be a very technically challenging problem.”

The company will use the latest funding to grow its staff and services. It unveiled the latest release of its SalesGenius product. Last fall it shipped a beta version of a product it calls GeniusInteractive, which allows marketing and sales people to interact live with visitors to their Web sites.