Amperity Raises $50M for Marketing Software Used by Consumer Brands

Amperity, a Seattle-based startup developing software to help consumer-facing brands collect and manage customer data, announced Monday it has raised $50 million in new financing to add more clients in industries on which it hasn’t previously concentrated.

New York-based Tiger Global Management led the Series C funding round. Other participating investors included Goldman Sachs, Madera Technology Partners, and Madrona Venture Group.

Three-year-old Amperity now raised $87 million in outside funding, the startup says in a news release. It plans to use some of the proceeds from the new round to persuade organizations in industries Amperity has not focused on up to this point—insurance, healthcare, and financial services, for example—to begin using the company’s products and services.

Many of the organizations in Amperity’s current client roster are in the retail, hospitality, and travel industries, the startup says. They use the company’s software to better understand their customers by creating profiles, which sales and marketing teams can use when working to acquire and retain consumers, Amperity says. The businesses that use the startup’s data analytics tech include Alaska Air Group (NYSE: [[ticker:ALK]]), Lucky Brand, and Planet Fitness (NYSE: [[ticker:PLNT]]).

In one case study for an unnamed retail brand that acquired another, Amperity says it determined how many customers had memberships at both brands, despite each company having databases with different formatting that couldn’t easily be compared. In another case study for an airline, Amperity says it helped track the how well customers liked a loyalty program.

Numerous large technology firms, such as Salesforce (NYSE: [[ticker:CRM]]), Oracle (NYSE: [[ticker:ORCL]]), and SAP (NYSE: [[ticker:SAP]]) also develop software designed to comb businesses’ data and help them get a clearer picture of their customers’ behavior and preferences.

Still, the retail analytics market is big, and expected to grow; the research firm Global Market Insights projects it will be worth $13 billion by 2024. That has helped Amperity and other startups in the sector, such as New York-based Optimove, raise money and continue signing up customers despite the presence of big players in the industry.

Derek Slager, Amperity’s chief technology officer, and CEO Kabir Shahani co-founded the startup in 2016, and raised a $9 million funding round that year.

Amperity introduced an initial version of its software in September 2017, as Shahani recounts in a blog post published Monday reflecting on his startup’s first years in business; the following month, Amperity announced it had raised an additional $28 million from investors.

“In just shy of two years, we’ve been able to develop a platform that, for the first time, helps companies tap into previously unattainable data and unify it so they can better understand and connect with their customers,” Shahani says in the release announcing the company’s new $50 million funding round.

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Author: Jeff Buchanan

Jeff formerly led Xconomy’s Seattle coverage since. Before that, he spent three years as editor of Xconomy Wisconsin, primarily covering software and biotech companies based in the Badger State. A graduate of Vanderbilt, he worked in health IT prior to being bit by the journalism bug.