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Amperity acquires Custora to improve its customer data platform
Amperity announced today that it’s acquiring another company in the customer data business, Custora.
Amperity co-founder and CEO Kabir Shahani told me that Custora’s technology complements what Amperity is already offering. To illustrate this point, he said that customer data tools fall into three big buckets: “The first is know your customer, the second is … use insights to make decisions, the third is … activate the data and use it to serve the customer.”
Amperity’s strength, Shahani said, is in that first bucket, while Custora’s is in the second. So with this acquisition (Amperity’s first), the existing Amperity technology will become the Amperity Customer 360, while Custora is rebranded as Amperity Insights.
The products can still be used separately, but Custora CEO Corey Pierson argued that they’re particularly powerful together.
“The stronger you actually know your customer, the stronger you have your customer 360 profile, the better those insights are,” Pierson said. “When we sit on top of Amperity, every insight we produce is more valuable to our customers.”
Shahani said Pierson and the rest of his team will be joining Seattle-based Amperity, with Custora’s New York office becoming the combined company’s East Coast headquarters.
The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. According to Crunchbase, Custora previously raised a total of $20.3 million in funding.
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Customer data management company Amperity raises $50M
Amperity is announcing that it has raised $50 million in Series C funding.
The company offers what co-founder and CEO Kabir Shahani said is the ability to “ingest every piece of atomic-level data remotely related to a customer and assemble it into a customer 360.”
To illustrate how Amperity can help businesses use their customer data more intelligently, Shahani (pictured above with his co-founder and CTO Derek Slager) said a company with a branded credit card could start sending targeted offers based on customer activity, while a retailer could start sending promotions targeted at online-only customers to bring them into physical stores.
And just to be clear: This is only using first-party data collected by the brand itself, not third-party data purchased from other companies. In fact, when I brought this up, Shahani told me he has a “very strong and convicted belief in the sanctity of the relationship between the consumer and brands.”
Amperity says that in 2018, its annual recurring revenue grew 355% year-over-year. Although the startup only launched in 2016, it’s already signed up an impressive roster of customers, like Starbucks, Gap Inc., TGI Fridays and Planet Fitness.
Shahani said that when they sign up with Amperity, most of these businesses are already trying to use customer data to improve their messaging, but they aren’t able to do so in “a real-time, in-the-moment, frequent way,” and they aren’t effectively merging data from different channels into a single profile.
He also argued that while Salesforce and Adobe have announced plans to move into this market, it was “kind of an intention announcement” — “There aren’t any real customers behind it, there aren’t any real use cases deployed.”
As the large marketing clouds build up their offerings, Shahani suggested that Amperity will still have the advantage of a “network effect,” with businesses recommending the company’s platform to each other, and will also benefit from an interest in standalone, “best-in-class” products.
“The marketing cloud phenomenon of 10 years ago, 15 years ago has certainly burned a lot of companies,” Shahani said.
Amperity has now raised a total of $87 million. The new funding comes from Tiger Global Management, Goldman Sachs, Declaration Partners, Madera Technology Partners, Madrona Venture Group and investor Lee Fixel (who previously backed Amperity through his role at Tiger).
“It’s been exciting to watch this team execute against their vision and develop the deep technical capability required to become the clear category leader,” Fixel said in a statement.
Among other things, the money should help Amperity beef up its sales and marketing — Shahani said it didn’t start seriously hiring a sales team until a year ago, and it didn’t hire its first chief marketing officer until three months ago.
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Amperity update gives customers more control over Customer Data Platform
The Customer Data Platform (CDP) has certainly been getting a lot of attention in marketing software circles over the last year as big dawgs like Salesforce and Adobe enter the fray, but Amperity, a Seattle-based startup, has been building a CDP solution since it launched in 2016, and today it announced some updates to give customers more control over the platform.
Chris Jones, chief product officer at Amperity, says this is an important step for the startup. “If you think about the evolution of our company, we started with an idea that turned into a [Marketing Data Platform], which was the engine that powered all of that, but that engine was largely operated by our delivery team. We’re now putting the power of that engine into the customers’ hands and giving them the full access to that,” Jones explained.
That is giving customers — which include Alaska Airlines, Nordstrom and The Gap — the power to control how the software works in the context of their companies, rather than using a black box approach where you have to use the software as delivered. He says that customers want the ability to start using the system to gain insights on their own.
One of the primary pieces in the newest version of Amperity to allow them to do that is Stitch, a tool that lets users pull together all of the interactions from a customer in a single view — ingesting the data, sorting, deduplicating it and delivering a list of all the interactions a brand has had with a given customer. From there, they can use the new Customer 360 visualization to get a more graphical view of the data.
Amperity Stitch Screenshot: Amperity.
Jones says companies can use this data to help different groups within a company, whether marketing, sales or service, understand the customer better before or during an interaction. For example, a marketer can segment the data in a very granular way to find all of the regular customers who aren’t part of the company loyalty program, and deliver them an email listing all of the benefits of joining.
Amperity launched in 2016, and has raised $37 million across two rounds. Its most recent funding came in 2017, a $28 million investment led by Tiger Global Management, according to Crunchbase data.
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