A startup that helps big brands like Starbucks in-house their data has raised $50 million to take on Salesforce and Adobe
- Amperity has raised $50 million in Series C funding, bringing the 2-year-old company's total funding to $87 million.
- The firm is one of a handful of marketing tech startups that provides software to help marketers manage customer data. The startups are trying to fend off marketing clouds like Adobe and Salesforce that are rolling out similar technology for marketers.
- Amperity CEO Kabir Shahani said that competition from marketing clouds actually helps startups by helping grow their awareness.
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The competition between startups and marketing clouds that help marketers corral their customer data is heating up.
Seattle-based Amperity has raised $50 million in Series C funding to grow its staff and products that help marketers group email, web, e-commerce and loyalty program data. The company uses machine learning to help brands with things like sending loyalty program members special emails or creating lookalike models for targeting ads. Amperity's clients include Starbucks, Gap Inc. and Planet Fitness.
Tiger Global Management, Goldman Sachs, Declaration Partners, Madera Technology Partners, Madrona Venture Group, and Lee Fixel participated in the funding round.
Amperity is one a handful of so-called customer data platforms that help marketers wrangle their data. It competes against startups like mParticle and Segment as well as marketing clouds including Adobe and Salesforce.
Startups want to take on marketing clouds
Similar to how agency holding companies pitch marketers on their ability to handle all of their advertising, marketing clouds are increasingly doing the same. Some brands and startups have pushed back, some of them arguing that it's better for marketers to put together their own tech stacks.
Amperity CEO Kabir Shahani said the market was growing because it's based on a Software as a Service (SaaS) model. And as more brands take their marketing in-house, they increasingly need to take responsibility for their analytics and data science.
"Everyone's trying to get into this space because it's a massive problem for the customer," Shahani said. "We think there is tens of billions of dollars in recurring revenue that can be created by solving this problem - it has absolutely become a very highly coveted space."
Shahani said that the company will use the funds to hire more employees, build new products, and move into the financial services, automotive and healthcare verticals. Amperity has 120 employees and plans to grow to 175 people by the end of the year.
One of the advantages of marketing clouds rolling out CDPs is that they support their products with large marketing budgets that make clients aware of the technology, Shahani said.
"We think that's a massive tailwind for us because we have such a huge head start, similar to what AWS [Amazon Web Services] has done in cloud infrastructure," he said.