Your Facebook ads are about to become smarter than you.
Toronto-based startup Gallop has bet on data science and machine learning to help mobile marketers everywhere make better decisions. Since only 900 apps in the world have over million users, out of over million apps in the App Store, there’s clearly room for improving marketing on mobile.
Alkarim Nasser, co-founder and head of product says Gallop’s platform can identify and grow the number of super-engaged users and provide timely incentives to prevent churn.
We may actually see relevant ads in our lifetime.
“Using data for actionable insights is a huge need,” Nasser told BetaKit. “Mobile marketing will become a multibillion market, but it’s still in its infancy from the marketing standpoint. If you fundamentally understand what users are doing in your platform today through analyzing customer data, you can make better business decisions. Customers identify the most important events within the app. Then Gallop platform tracks insights: if users share more, they will read more, for example – and predicts behaviour.”
Gallop grew out of Gallop Labs, a startup spin-off incubated inside BNOTIONS. The company kicked off the year with some significant milestones under its belt, securing $2 million in funding, winning a Facebook Innovation Award for its work on increasing the number of users for a popular music app, as well as being named Canada’s Most Innovative Company at the Canadian Innovation Exchange.
“If you’re advertising with targeting people who look like your best users today, you will succeed. We want to power every marketing decision,” says Karthik Ramakrishnan, CEO and co-founder of Gallop. “We treat all channels as communication channels, define the customer journey, and optimize against the customer behaviour based on the sets of attributes best customers share. When we worked with Kobo, we were able to increase customer retention and bring down the cost of installations significantly. That’s what excites us about marketing, applying customer intelligence to help companies unlock business value.”
For the next few months Gallop will focus on its target customer – medium-sized mobile publishers with the user base of 100K to 750K monthly users – and help them outsmart larger organizations and bigger budgets. The company is open to partnering with select agencies interested in transforming data into human intelligence to inform decisions. When not working, they hang out with entrepreneurs in small rooms getting coffee, our new favourite podcast.
If Gallop can pull a Turing and break the Enigma by using machine learning and data science to recommend optimal next steps to marketers, we may actually see relevant ads in our lifetime.
UPDATE (02/10/15): Toronto’s Gallop announced additional funding this week, bringing the total financing to a cool $2.5 million to accelerate product development.
Alkarim Nasser, co-founder and head of product at Gallop, says the company is fortunate to have surrounded ourselves with some of Canada’s top entrepreneurs and investors. “We pride ourselves as being a Canadian-grown company and to have the provincial government participate via their Investment Accelerator Fund is a great addition to our Canadian footprint. This most recent extension to our seed round also includes leaders who have built great companies like Michael Litt and Devon Galloway behind YC-grad Vidyard and Mike McCauley a founder at Google-acquired BufferBox. We are excited to bring their expertise to the table.”