Our $100M Series C Extension: Why it Happened, What it Means

We are excited to announce a fresh funding infusion, in the form of a $100M Series C extension, barely a year after our initial Series C closing. The extension was led by our existing investors who, having been with us for a long time, clearly see how we have taken the lead position in the emerging CDP market. 

First, let’s give a quick summary of what it is that we do. ActionIQ serves as a Smart Customer Experience (CX) Hub for the Enterprise. A true Smart CX Hub provides 3 critical capabilities: 

1. Connect customer data and identities together, especially behavioral and offline data, to create a full and flexible view of the customer and their behavior. Note that the CX Hub does not replace a customer data lake but rather seamlessly integrates with it.
2. Provide an AI-powered interface for business users and analysts to identify insights and instantly act on them, in a 100% “no-code” environment; and, finally,
3. Enable business users to design intelligent, automated and channel-agnostic customer experiences that drive revenue, retention and customer satisfaction.

But why is NOW the time for the CX Hub to thrive? Actually, a lot has to do with COVID-19 and its brutal ability to catalyze and accelerate everything.

How COVID-19 Made the Smart CX Hub a Necessity

Customer Data Platforms initially started as something of a niche market. A few years back, it was mostly traditional retailers and retail brands, struggling to respond to the eCommerce and D2C disruption, that decided to take a risk on a new technology to help with digital transformation and better customer experiences. This is not a coincidence; oftentimes you see distressed industries making a bet on technologies that more comfortable, stable industries are unwilling to make early on.

The market “crossed the chasm” mainly thanks to our two biggest competitors: in 2018, Adobe and Salesforce “announced” competitive CDP solutions as a reaction to our growing win rates with their enterprise clients. This is classic big company playbook; by doing that, they hoped to “kick the can down the road” and convince their customers to wait for their CDP solutions (many are still waiting). However, the opposite happened: by essentially admitting a massive gap in their product portfolio, they kicked off a torrent of evaluations by brands who, in addition to evaluating Adobe and Salesforce CDPs, also invited who they thought was the best pure-play CDP solution – ActionIQ! And because the big Marketing Clouds don’t have real solutions in the space, this allowed us to win major logos that would otherwise have taken us a few more years to earn their business.    

So finally, COVID-19 hit a year ago. And its effect was to take many industries that could afford to “do nothing”, and push them into the forefront of investment and innovation in digital transformation, customer experience, and customer data. We saw strong demand from  Fortune 100 companies across many industries that would normally be late adopters of innovative technology. 

$100M Series C Extension

It’s no wonder then that we have seen our business grow beyond our expectations in the last 12 months. This round extension, which was proactive in nature since we were barely halfway through our initial Series C funding, will allow us to invest across all fronts. We have always been big believers in building a product-led company and will double down on expanding and maturing our product capabilities across data, intelligence and orchestration. We will also speed up the scaling of our go-to-market and servicing teams to capture the market demand that is currently growing exponentially. 

What it means for our customers

We wouldn’t be here without our customers, many of whom took a risk and selected ActionIQ when CDPs was still an emerging category. As some of our clients have stated publicly their early bet paid off significantly. This funding round gives our customers further confidence that investment in the product and our customer servicing teams will continue in an accelerated fashion to meet all of their demands. 

For prospects and the market at large, this funding round means that the gap between our product and the competition will grow even bigger over the next few years; and it makes ActionIQ a reliable partner to invest in for the long run. 

In closing

Customer Data and Customer Experience is the key for most industries to evolve and modernize, and we believe we are the only company whose Smart CX Hub actually gets the job done.  If you are in the market for a solution, please reach out to us to experience the combination of a powerful product with our obsession for making customers successful. 

Last but not least, I want to thank our employees who, through their hard work and conviction, brought ActionIQ where it is today. We wouldn’t be here without you. The future will be more exciting and fun than what we ever imagined, so let’s go ahead and build something truly exceptional!