Marketing tech startup mParticle has raised $35 million in Series C funding

Marketing technology startup mParticle has raised $35 million in Series C funding.

The funding round was led by Harmony Venture Partners and included previous investors Bain Capital Ventures and Social Capita. The company has raised a total of $76 million since launching in 2013.

mParticle has built software designed to help marketers suck in data from a multitude of sources - apps, websites, digital distribution channels, etc. - and make sense of it all. The company recently landed the No. 3 spot on Business Insider's ranking of the 19 most interesting ad-tech upstarts of 2017.

Big marketers turn to so-called 'marketing cloud' companies like Adobe and Salesforce to help them sort and process of their growing piles of data - such as where their consumers live, how big their households are what they've purchased in the past. Still, there's an increasing need for someone to plug into the various platforms these companies use for digital marketing and automatically put that data into usable form, argues mParticle co-founder and CEO Michael Katz.

"More and more, consumer data is spread all over the place," he said, noting that the average consumer accesses content on half a dozen devices, from connected TVs to smartphones. "Existing web marketing tools were never built for this. So we've built this data ingestion system for all of their digital touchpoints. We can help brands build a customer-centric view."

mParticle's funding comes at a time when many ad tech firms have faced consolidation and investor skepticism. But companies claiming to be in the 'marketing tech' sector - i.e. those that supply software as a service directly to big brands, have fared far better.

mParticle's customers include Venmo, Starwood, NBC Universal, Spotify and Airbnb. The company plans to use to funding to double its headcount and invest in its technology.