Funnelytics, a customer journey visualization and analytics startup, has landed a $1.85 million CAD seed extension round from the GreenSky Accelerator Fund IV. The oversubscribed round included participation from MaRS Investment Accelerator Fund, and angel investors from the GreenSky President’s Club.
The funding round closed in mid-January.
“There comes a point when consumers want privacy, but they want targeted ads; they want a customized experience.”
– Mikael Dia, Funnelytics
It’s the second time GreenSky and MaRS have invested in Funnelytics. The pair co-led a $1.5 million CAD seed round for Funnelytics in 2020.
The funding will allow the company to launch version 2.0 of its mapping tool, expand its mid-market offering, and build out the existing community to allow for a marketplace of users offering services built around the Funnelytics platform.
Mikael Dia, Funnelytics’ founder and CEO, said the company decided to raise an internal round from its past investors due to the existing relationship and their knowledge of the value and vision of the business.
Funnelytics’ platform helps small to medium-sized businesses see the performance of their online customer journeys. The startup’s platform includes a data collection script that tracks and reports real-time activity across the company’s web pages, ad platforms, CRMs, and other customer touch-points.
In addition to its growing customer base, Funnelytics claims to have built an active worldwide community of some 280,000 mapping tool users for its free version. It does not disclose the number of customers for its paid product.
Mikael Dia, Funnelytics’ CEO, founded the startup in June 2018 to make mapping customer activity online easier. Currently, the startup has 19 employees.
“With the increased concerns around privacy and the increasing shift away from direct tracking, marketers need to evolve and better understand what is driving traffic and actions on their web properties,” Dia said. “Funnelytics has always been the best way to visualize this data.”
Third-party cookies that track users around the web are being dispensed with, already gone from the Safari and Firefox browsers, while Chrome has committed to getting rid of them by the end of 2023.
The changes mean marketers will no longer be able to track the preferences of individuals when they arrive at websites, what shopping sites they visit, what publications they read, and what the most popular sites they visit on a monthly basis.
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“There comes a point when consumers want privacy, but they want targeted ads; they want a customized experience,” said Dia. “On the flip side, businesses want to provide a customized experience and they want to make the customer journey more fluid. So there has to be a balance created between both businesses and consumers.”
Funnelytic’s platform is designed to anonymize consumer information, but it’s not the only startup concerned over the new standards around consumer privacy.
Trufan received $2 million in 2021 to support the growth of the startup’s recently launched, free browser extension: Surf for consumers. The extension allows users to passively earn points for their everyday browsing, and then redeem those points for items and gift cards in the extensive Surf marketplace while keeping users information anonymous.
“We can respect user privacy and compensate users for their data directly while also providing brands with the kind of data they cannot find anywhere else with these privacy changes coming up,” Trufan co-founder and CEO Swish Goswami told BetaKit in 2021.
Recently, digital marketing and analytic startups have also been acquisition targets. Landing page and conversion optimization company Unbounce acquired United States-based LeadsRx in January to bring marketing analytics tech to its small and medium-sized business (SMB) customers.
The same month, Redbrick, a startup that acquires and builds innovative digital companies, acquired Delivra, a provider of automated email marketing solutions from Indianapolis. And Wishpond acquired Winback.chat from AtlasMind Inc. for $700,000 USD in cash. Winback provides automated SMS marketing solutions, including a cart abandonment tool for Shopify merchants that can be installed with a single click.
“What’s happening in the marketplace is businesses are trying to consolidate,” Dia observed, noting they are eliminating competition by doing so.
“Funnelytics’ core value proposition – providing companies the ability to see their data in an understandable way – will always be relevant,” said Greg Stewart, a managing partner at GreenSky. “Understanding this, the company continues to capitalize on opportunities and deliver value through new product offerings and innovations. We are excited to see where this new capital will take the company.”
Image source Funnelytics website.