Picture the trove of data that companies have stored up about you over the years—your clicks, likes, posts, purchases, devices, demographics, credit score, and more. That’s the fuel for a new wave of automated, highly personalized marketing pitches.
Seattle startup Amplero just raised $17.5 million to build the machine that would create those pitches “at a scale that is not humanly possible,” as the company puts it. Amplero also says it’s making sure to build a system that lets human marketers keep tabs on what their machine counterparts are up to.
Amplero says its software “leverages automated machine learning and multi-armed bandit experimentation to deliver highly contextual, cross-channel customer experiences across the entire customer lifecycle.” (A multi-armed bandit, by the by, is a way of modeling complex decisions.) The company says its system also allows marketers to peer inside the technology to understand more about why it’s making specific recommendations, and how these connect to bigger-picture business goals—an attempt to address the so-called black box problem in A.I.
Amplero and its investors—Ignition Partners and Greycroft Partners co-led the company’s Series B funding round—are betting that this technology will appeal to consumer-focused brands.
“Across nearly every vertical, we’re seeing a shift where ongoing monetization and customer relationships have replaced the traditional, transactional model,” Mark Terbeek, partner at Greycroft, says in a news release. “Essentially, brands that aren’t focused on cultivating long-term relationships and customer value metrics are at risk from category outsiders like Amazon, Google, and Facebook—at any point. Amplero’s ability to optimize toward long-term metrics through A.I. is a business advantage for enterprise marketing teams.”
Existing Amplero investors Wildcat Venture Partners, Seven Peaks Ventures, and Trilogy Equity Partners, also joined the funding round. The company raised an $8 million Series A funding round last summer.
Amplero counts among its customers Sprint, Virgin Mobile, Xbox, Boeing Employees Credit Union, and DoubleDown Interactive.
Amplero, founded in 2016, is headed by CEO Olly Downs, chief business officer Lisa Clarke, CTO Andrew Toner, and Michael Zell, senior vice president of customer success.
