CMO's top 8 martech stories for the week - 10 March 2022
- 10 March, 2022 15:47
Cross-channel experience management player reaches US$1.22bn valuation
Insider is planning to invest AUD$70 million into the Australian market over the next three years after securing US$121 million in Series D funding.
The latest investment round was led by QIA and brings the SaaS player’s market valuation up to US$1.22 billion. Other contributors included Sequoia, Riverwood Capital, 212, Wamda Capital, Esas Private Equity and Endeavor Catalyst.
Headquartered in Singapore, Insider has more than 1000 customers including Australian retailers such as Accent Group, Samsung, Country Road, David Jones and Wittner. Because of this, the company said it’ll inject $70 million into Australian expansion plans.
It also plans to create more than 100 jobs globally over the next three years. Additional capital will also be used to fuel rapid expansion, enhance the company’s core technology and scale sales and marketing investments.
Insider’s AI-powered platform is designed to bring together personalisation capabilities with emerging messaging channels like WhatsApp, Facebook, RCS and SMS. Insider technology coordinates offline and online data into a unified platform so it can be used to connect customer data across channels and systems, to unearth interests and preferred touchpoints, predict future behaviour across different customer segments, and optimise campaign experiences accordingly.
With this funding milestone, the company noted it’s become one of a few female-led SaaS unicorns in the world. Founded in 2012 by CEO, Hande Cilingir, Serhat Soyuerel (chief revenue officer), Arda Koterin (chief customer officer), Sinan Toktay (CTO), Okan Yedibela (VP of Engineering) and Muharrem Derinkök (chief product officer), the Insider team has more than 700 team members from 41 different nationalities across 28 countries.
“We’ve been blitz scaling remarkably in the past three years and achieved 3X growth. In the same period, our global team grew by 300 per cent, and our customer base continues to increase,” said Cilingir. “Following our aggressive expansion in Asia, Europe and LATAM, we’ll carry this momentum in the US market.”
Metadata.io Raises US$40m for B2B marketing operating system
Metadata.io has secured US$40 million in Series B funding to progress its automated operating system for B2B marketers.
The latest investment round was led by Next47 and Resolute Ventures, with participation from a number of SaaS founders and CEOs. The new capital is earmarked for developing what Metadata.io is positioning as a new software category, accelerate growth and expand platform capabilities to meet its vision as the first operating system for B2B marketers.
The way the startup is hoping to blaze a new trail is by using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to automate repetitive tasks B2B marketers experience day-to-day. The pitch is to help optimise campaigns and scale performance without having to hire additional resources.
And it’s gaining interest. Metadata claimed it grew 711 per cent year-on-year in the past 24 months, adding 110 new customers and securing five patents for its technology and growing database of 1.5 billion business profiles, segmented by technographics, firmographics and buyer intent signals.
“In 2021, the Metadata platform executed nearly $50 million of digital spend for over 150 customers across Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, Quora and Display, resulting in over $130 million in marketing-sourced pipeline and over $2 billion of influenced pipeline,” said Metadata CEO, Gil Allouche. “No other technology was able to provide this amount of efficiency for B2B marketers. This funding validates the market demand for our technology and will help us develop this technology further.”
Adriel Raises $13m Series B funding
Our third capital raising story this week is from Adriel, which is putting together an all-in-one digital marketing platform for managing paid advertising campaigns.
The US-based company’s latest US$13 million Series B funding round brings total investment to $17 million to date. Shinhan Venture Investment led the new round with continued participation from KT Investment, LB Investment and Quantum Ventures Investment.
The newly secured funding will help expand Adriel’s North American and European footprint with operations and sales teams established in San Francisco and Paris, France. Adriel is also looking to ramp up work on its scalable, end-to-end ad operations system that helps businesses consolidate agile workflows across all stages of the marketing lifecycle.
Just five years old, Adriel 6000 clients include LG, Decathlon and CJ ENM. The company claims it’s increased ROI for these businesses while reducing workload and human error on nearly 32,000 campaigns across more than 20 channels.
Smartsheet better integrates work and digital asset management
Smartsheet has announced new integration capabilities between its marketing and sales management platform and digital asset management tool, Brandfolder.
The vendor said enhancing the functionality between Smartsheet and Brandfolder helps marketers better manage their work, content and people from ideation to execution. Capabilities include managing dynamic content end-to-end, the ability to attach assets to a row or sheet directly in Smartsheet from Brandfolder, two-click publish to Brandfolder from a completed proof in Smartsheet, and quicker uploads. Customers can also access Brandfolder Insights data in Smartsheet, which allows marketers to pull top user and top asset data directly from Brandfolder Insights into Smartsheet.
“By seamlessly combining a market-leading work management platform with an intuitive digital asset management solution, marketers and creatives can harness a powerful platform to create the impactful work that builds their brand,” said Smartsheet senior VP, product management, Ben Canning.
Nielsen beefs up digital ad identity system in Australia
Nielsen has confirmed new enhancements to its open Web methodology for Digital Ad Ratings through the Nielsen Identity System will be available in Australia from 1 April.
The Australian launch of the Nielsen Identity System comes off the back of launches in Italy, France and the UK earlier this year. The company reported preview data for the month of November 2021 for these markets saw more than 90 per cent of all Digital Ad Ratings Open Web campaigns reported with demographics.
The Nielsen Identity System measures digital campaigns on several factors including reach and frequency for the open Web alongside integrations already in place for the walled gardens. It does this by connecting digital ad impressions to Australian demographic data from both Nielsen and third-party data providers, incorporating more than 57 million device identifiers. This is designed to ensure demographics are de-duped across mobile and PC platforms for more accurate measurement.
Nielsen has confirmed Unpacked by Flybuys as its first Australian data provider for the measurement solution. Other global data partners providing local identity data include The Trade Desk, Equifax AU, Kochava, BDEX, Full Contact, MediaWallah, Toluna and Cint.
“By drawing on data from strategic data providers, we’re making a huge leap towards delivering people-based measurement for digital campaigns in a way that will integrate with other channels to deliver cross-channel campaign measurement,” Nielsen executive director of commercial growth and product strategy, Jonathan Betts, said. “These strategic relationships ensure we’re delivering unparalleled value and insights for our local Digital Ad Ratings clients. The Nielsen Identity System serves to unify the identity data that Nielsen receives in an interoperable way across the media ecosystem.”
Nielsen is also launching its enhanced Identity System in Japan, Germany and India in April, with Spain, Indonesia, Canada, Singapore, Thailand and Hong Kong to follow later this year.
Sinch launches enhanced MMS messaging and personalisation for Oracle Responsys
Sweden-based mobile customer engagement vendor, Sinch AB, has taken the wrappers off expanded rich media MMS messaging within Oracle Responsys.
The Sinch MMS Messaging App powered by Sureshot is available in the Oracle Marketplace and combines Responsys’ personalisation and content management services with Sinch’s MMS App. The Sinch MMS Messaging App is designed to extend the Responsys creative palette adding video, audio, PDF, vCard, extended text payload and geo-location maps to existing image media support.
Sinch’s flagship cloud communications platform allows users to reach consumers via mobile messaging, email, voice and video.
“We are proud to deliver a significant leap forward in rich messaging capabilities for customer engagements based on feedback from several customers of Oracle Responsys,” said Sinch SVP and GM, Vikram Khandpur. “We look forward to creating meaningful engagement for brands and consumers over the course of the new year and beyond.”
DoubleVerify earns MRC accreditation for programmatic targeting services
Digital media measurement vendor, DoubleVerify, has gained accreditation across its suite of programmatic targeting services from the Media Rating Council.
The accreditation covers its Fraud/IVT (SIVT and GIVT) Avoidance solution for desktop, mobile Web, mobile apps and connected TV (CTV), including platform wide IVT avoidance, along with display and video viewability targeting for desktop, mobile Web and mobile apps.
In addition, DoubleVerify said its Authentic Brand Suitability service for creating a centralised set of brand safety and sustainability controls across programmatic campaigns is also now accredited at a property level for ad verification for site, page and app-level targeting, in over 30 languages. So is its Standard Brand Suitability offering available for site, page and app classification, along with app-specific segments based on app store Age Rating and App Star Reviews; plus Standard Contextual and Custom Contextual, which deliver privacy-safe performance by aligning ads to relevant content.
DoubleVerify said the latest accreditations make it the only provider with the credentials for both predictive viewability targeting as well as property-level ad verification, inclusive of brand suitability and contextual targeting within programmatic media campaigns.
Snowflake acquires Streamlit
Data management platform provider, Snowflake, has acquired Streamlit, which provides a framework aimed at simplifying and accelerating creation of data applications.
The two companies said they’re joining forces to better unlock data and make it easier to build business applications. The acquisition is subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions. Financial terms were not disclosed.
The Snowflake Data Cloud provides developers and data scientists with a secure collaboration hub for data. Streamlit’s open-source framework enables developers and data scientists to build and share data apps and to do so quickly and iteratively, without the need to be an expert in front-end development. Streamlit has more than 8 million downloads and more than 1.5m applications have been built using this framework.
The deal will see Streamlit users benefit from greater resources, while Snowflake customers will be able to leverage Streamlit’s robust app development framework to further unlock data with the Snowflake Data Cloud. Both will benefit from an even larger and more active community contributing to the Streamlit framework.
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