Amperity raises $100M to unify customer data

Amperity, a Seattle, Washington-based customer data platform, today announced it has raised $100 million in series D funding, valuing the company at more than $1 billion post-money. Founder and CEO Kabir Shahani said the company will use these funds, which bring its total raised to $187 million, to expand sales and marketing, grow internationally, and invest in R&D.

The pressures of the pandemic made knowing consumers a matter of survival for many businesses. Faced with the challenge of optimizing performance without third-party data, brands recognized the necessity of having an identity graph as part of an effort to sustain customer relationships. These graphs, which are at the foundation of customer data platforms, allow enterprises to make sense of trillions of data points from customers across in-store visits, web traffic, mobile usage, loyalty programs, and other touchpoints.

Amperity was founded in 2016 by Shahani and Derek Slager, who aimed to free engineers from integration duties while giving businesses access to the data they need to build loyalty. Prior to founding Amperity, Kabir and Derek worked together to launch enterprise marketing management startup Appature, where Kabir was CEO and Derek was VP of engineering. Appature was purchased in 2013 by IT medical services provider IMS Health, which has since merged with Quintiles.

“Amperity has created the first-party data graph and customer toolset for many of the world’s most loved consumer brands. There’s a vast universe of solutions that might provide an element of what we do, but no one can deliver a more complete customer [view] with an agnostic approach we provide at both ends — data in, data out,” Shahani told VentureBeat via email.

Behind the scenes

Customer data platforms are collections of software that create persistent, unified customer databases accessible to other systems. Data is pulled from multiple sources, cleaned, and combined to create a single customer profile. This structured data is then made available to other marketing systems.

The customer data platform market is anticipated to be worth $10.3 billion by 2025, according to Markets and Markets, up from $2.4 billion in 2020. Amperity’s competitors include homegrown solutions, as well as legacy on-premises systems from Acxiom and Epsilon Independent and cloud-based services like ActionIQ and Redpoint Marketing.

But Shahani claims Amperity is the only customer data platform with an “AI-driven customer 360.” Each of its products is built on what the company calls the DataGrid, a fully connected customer infrastructure that processes terabytes of data each day. DataGrid streams billions of rows of data at under 100 milliseconds per API call, enabling Amperity’s AI models to provide deterministic and probabilistic individual and household identity throughout customer segments.

Amperity works with customers across retail, travel, hospitality, and financial services, including Patagonia, Alaska Airlines, Starbucks, The Home Depot, Lucky Brand, and Crocs. Recently, Amperity teamed up with a lifestyle retail client to better understand the company’s customers. In 18 weeks, Amperity says it built a dashboard with transaction, marketing, store, product, and privacy data, correcting lifecycle status for 25% of the client’s customers with interaction and revenue attribution. This led to $7.7 million in campaign revenue from predictive segmentation and churn prevention campaigns.

Above: Amperity’s customer profile dashboard.

Image Credit: Amperity

Over the past year, Amperity’s recurring revenue grew nearly 200%, Shahani says, thanks in part to business from new customers Williams-Sonoma, Tapestry, Under Armour, Smithsonian, and Airstream.

“The market opportunity for consumer data platforms continues to grow at a staggering rate, with 34% compound annual growth rate over the next five years … With an expected $10 billion total available market in 2025, we believe this category to be the next big emerging technology sector — on par with enterprise resource management [and] customer relationship management — signaling the importance of customer data platforms in the broader enterprise software ecosystem,” Shahani added. “Salesforce, Adobe, and Oracle … have been slowly rolling out their version of a customer data platform, but so far, there’s no proof they have a tangible product.”

He added that Amperity is not phased by the competition. “They operate within a closed ecosystem, so while we technically compete, we also believe that we’re complementary because we can fit into the larger marketing technology stack.”

Amperity’s latest funding round was led by HighSage Ventures, with participation from existing investors Tiger Global Management, Declaration Partners, Madrona Venture Group, and MaderaTechnology Partners. The company has 225 employees, and it expects to grow its workforce to over 300 by the end of the year.