Marketer customer data platform Transitiv has raised a $1.7 million seed round, led by Atlanta-based early growth stage venture firm Vocap Investment Partners.
“Vocap Partners are a great strategic partner for us as they’ve been operators before and have walked in our shoes,” co-CEO Ashley Messer tells Hypepotamus. “They have a really deep portfolio in marketing technology and they can connect us with future key partners.”
The oversubscribed round will be used to support the startup’s 2019 organic growth, accelerate product development, and hire more marketing and customer success team members to enhance the customer experience.
There isn’t really a system inside a company that’s actually owned by marketers — CRMs are either owned by sales or by operations, shares Messer. “The closest they’ll get to owning their data is through email tools,” he says.
Email tools don’t hold a transaction history or customers’ interactions. There are many systems inside an organization that hold different parts of customer data. For marketers to do their jobs well, they need accurate customer data.
“Most of the time, they spend all their time with an external system, like media platforms,” says Messer.
Transitiv helps marketers gather and track the customer data behind their customers’ journey in one place by pulling information from all internal systems, API credentials, or tags on their site.
The data is displayed on a graph with AI-powered models that segment and score customers.
They can then use those insights for targeting and segmentation purposes in Google, Facebook, programmatic markets, direct mail, and more.
“There’s no turf battle that happens for the marketer and other teams and stakeholders since we don’t require changes to existing systems,” says Messer. “We’re focused on how marketers can drive one-to-one conversations at scale.”
The product expanded from its 2016 initial iteration after customer acquisition led to a bigger gap in the market, says Messer. At the time, Transitiv helped marketers clean their data collection and collaborate with data science teams to build models for ad serving and get performance feedback to tune their models over time based on impact.
“There was this space opening up. Most customer data platforms out there are only targeting enterprises. They have to hire consultants and data scientists to come help because marketing doesn’t have a huge tech team at their disposal,” says Messer about the expansion of the startup’s market.
“There has to be a way to expand our offering to make it really easy to tie all this customer journey data across different systems together and help marketers do something useful with it.”
To grow in this new direction, Christian Pillat joined Transitiv in 2018 as co-CEO to help commercialize the platform and bring his marketing expertise to the startup.
This fall, Transitiv tripled its revenue and customer acquisition compared to the beginning of 2019. They remain a SaaS product with franchise and brand network customers like OXI Fresh and Scooter’s Coffee, as well as nationwide car dealers and others.
“In a short period of time Transitiv has emerged as the go-to customer data platform for multi-location retailers and brand network businesses, as evidenced by the overwhelmingly positive market feedback to date. We look forward to helping establish the operational foundations to more aggressively scale on top of Transitiv’s strong product-market fit,” Vocap Partners’ Mike Becker said in a statement.
