ActionIQ, which helps companies use their customer data to deliver personalized experiences, is announcing that it has extended its Series C funding, bringing the round to a total size of $100 million.
That number includes the $32 million that ActionIQ announced in January of last year. Founder and CEO Tasso Argyros said the company is framing this as an extension rather than a separate round because it comes from existing investors — including March Capital — and because ActionIQ still has most of that $32 million in the bank.
Argyros told me that there were two connected reasons to raise additional money now. For one thing, ActionIQ has seen 100% year-over-year revenue growth, allowing it to increase its valuation by more than 250%. (The company isn’t not disclosing the actual valuation.) That growth has also meant that ActionIQ is getting “a lot more ambitious” in its plans for product development and customer growth.
“We raised more money because we can, and because we need to,” Argyros said.
The company continues to develop the core platform, for example by introducing more support for real-time data and analysis. But Argyros suggested that the biggest change has been in the broader market for customer data platforms, with companies like Morgan Stanley, The Hartford, Albertsons, JCPenney and GoPro signing on with ActionIQ in the past year.
Some of these enterprises, he said, “normally would not work with a cutting-edge technology company like us, but because of the pandemic, they’re willing to take some risk and really invest in their customer base and their customer experience.”
Argyros also argued that as regulators and large platforms restrict the ways that businesses can buy and sell third-party data, platforms like ActionIQ, focusing on the first-party data that companies collect for their own use, will become increasingly important. And he said that ActionIQ’s growth comes as the big marketing clouds have “failed” — either announcing products that have yet to launch or launching products that don’t match ActionIQ’s capabilities.
Companies that were already using ActionIQ include The New York Times. In fact, the funding announcement includes a statement from The Times’ senior vices president of data and insights Shane Murray declaring that the newspaper is using ActionIQ to deliver “hundreds of billions of personalized customer experiences” across “mail, in-app, site, and paid media.”
ActionIQ has now raised around $145 million total, according to Crunchbase.
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