The marketing world has increasingly become a world of marketing technology. However, marketers do not necessarily possess the technical knowledge to process terabytes of data generated by a campaign.Stockholm-based Funnel, addressed this problem by building a no-code platform to help manage that process.They have is announced $66 million in funding, a financing round that highlights the demand in the market. Funnel is describing this as a “pre-IPO” round: It will be its last before it files to go public, likely in Sweden in the next 6 to 18 months.
Fourth Swedish National Pension Fund (AP4) and Stena Sessan are co-leading the round, with previous backers Balderton Capital, Eight Roads, F-Prime, Oxx and Industrifonden also participating, among others. The company has not disclosed its valuation but Fredrik Skantze, the co-founder and CEO, e said it was considerably higher than its pre-money valuation in its last round, a $47 million Series B in January 2020.
The company boasts over 1000 large customers, half of which are based in the US and include brands like Home Depot, trivago, Skechers, Samsung, Vodafone, Logitech, Skyscanner and SAS — Scandinavian Airlines, as well as Havas Media, a division of the French advertising and PR giant, Ogilvy and DAC Group.
“Four or five years ago, a marketer typically used seven data sources,” said Skantze. “Then that grew to 10. Now, our customers might be using 20 to 30 or even 70 or 80 data sources. If you are active in 50 markets that becomes a complex problem.”
“It’s not enough to simply use the raw data,” Skantze observed. “Facebook alone has 700 metrics, and the data you will get from a campaign just goes to a data warehouse. So you have to make it business-ready, you have to normalize it. That means using something like SQL. And that means marketers themselves cannot work directly with that funnel of data.”
“We are long-term investors who look for companies we like and hold them for a long time. We were impressed with the size of the global opportunity and the team’s ambition to build a large software company,” said Jannis Kitsakis, senior portfolio manager at AP4, in a statement.
