Sequoia Bets on ActionIQ for Marketers

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Source (paywall): WSJ – Sequoia Bets on ActionIQ for Marketers’ Data Management Platform

As part of our ActionIQ “reveal” that started last October, we are happy to announce that Sequoia has led both our seed round and our Series A. FirstMark Capital, along with our seed round investors, also participated in the Series A.

WSJ’s Patience Haggin reports that “Sequoia Capital has led a $13 million Series A round in ActionIQ Inc., a startup whose software aims to streamline various sources of company data into a single marketing and analytics dashboard. With the investment, Sequoia is laying down its bet in a crowded market for software that integrates customer data from multiple sources for marketers.”

Sequoia Managing Partner and ActionIQ board member, Doug Leone, told Haggin that “We have been inundated with volumes of data…the speed to answers has opened the door to a new set of startups that can solve complex problems really easy, for mere mortals, as they say.”

Our co-founder and CEO, Tasso Argyros, has known Sequoia’s Leone for over 10 years. Leone invested in his first startup, Aster Data, sold in under 6 years to Teradata for over $300M.

Argyros explained to WSJ’s Haggin that ActionIQ is one of the first “Post-Bigdata” wave of startups focused on putting data innovation into the hands of business users, to finally realize the promise of Big Data that was made several years ago.

Fortune 500 companies today are forced to use multiple vendors when trying to a) activate their various customer data sources and then b) distribute gained insights across channels back to customers. This creates inherent operational challenges, and from a data perspective, simply doesn’t work. Why? Because the data needs to first be centralized and structured in raw form–so that it can be played with, experimented with, and used by non-IT people–or as Leone would say, mere mortals. The data centre also needs an intuitive UI designed for the marketing use case so that marketers can build campaigns at scale, with speed, ingenuity and freedom from IT.

Fortunately for the CTOs, CIOs, and CMOs looking to buy these Customer Data Platforms, there are great early success stories. It’s a new market, and one we are thrilled to be leading.

Tasso Argyros
Tasso Argyros
Founder & CEO
Tasso left the Stanford PhD program to start Aster Data, which was acquired by Teradata for $325M. At Teradata, he continued to solve big data problems for Fortune 500 enterprises. Tasso’s passion for empowering business users led him to start ActionIQ, with the mission of bridging the gap between data & action.
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