Toronto-based advertising technology startup Motion, which sells analytics and research tools for creative strategists, has secured $30 million USD in Series B funding.
Founded in 2021 by a trio of Hubba and Shoelace alumni in CEO Reza Khadjavi, CTO Alexander Sloan, and head of finance David Berglas, Motion aims to become the platform that helps companies turn data into ad ideas.
As audience targeting on ad platforms has become more algorithm-based, Khadjavi argued that the creative part of advertising has become “the most important part of the equation,” which he said has given rise to the role of a creative strategist. “Motion is building all of the tooling that a creative strategist needs to do their job well,” Khadjavi told BetaKit in an exclusive interview.
“We’re fortunate to have been at the right place at the right time.”
Reza Khadjavi, Motion
Motion has developed software to help creative strategists research ad trends, analyze ad performance, and turn that data into new ad ideas. Khadjavi sees a big market opportunity in doing just that, and the company’s Series B investors have bought into this vision.
Today, in addition to this financing, Motion also announced that it has brought on YouTube and advertising industry influencer Dara Denney as chief evangelist to advise on product direction, create educational content, and help train creative strategists. The company also released a new product called Creative Research that extends its capabilities on the research side of ad production.
Motion’s all-equity Series B round, which closed earlier this month, was led by Montréal-based Inovia Capital with support from fellow new backer Threshold Ventures and other existing Silicon Valley investors: Headline, Abstract Ventures, and Sugar Capital. Khadjavi said the round was majority primary with some secondary, but declined to disclose further details.
This Series B round brings Motion’s total funding to date to $42 million (all figures USD), an amount that includes a $6-million seed round from September 2022 as well as a previously unannounced $6-million Series A insider round from December 2023, both of which were led by Headline. Khadjavi claimed Motion’s Series B came at a “much higher” valuation than its Series A financing, but declined to share exactly how the round valued the adtech startup.
Khadjavi, Sloan, and Berglas previously worked together at Hubba, an online marketplace for independent retailers, and founded fellow Toronto startup Shoelace, which began as a Shopify app before becoming a marketing agency. “We’ve been building for this ecosystem of the direct-to-consumer advertiser for almost 10 years now … We understand this audience extremely well,” Khadjavi said.
Khadjavi explained that e-commerce companies typically have razor-thin margins. “There’s basically no room for error. If the ads don’t work well, they’re just going to lose money,” he said, adding that given this, e-commerce marketers “tend to be the best-of-the-best advertisers.
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After seeing this group “hacking together a lot of homegrown solutions” to measure the performance of creative advertising, the trio launched Motion to help e-commerce marketers better understand what ads are working and what are not. During the company’s early days, Khadjavi thought Motion may top out as a reporting tool for advertisers. Now, he is confident that the software-as-a-service (SaaS) startup’s potential is much greater.
“Motion’s market opportunity is vast, with over $85 billion spent annually on social network ads in the US alone across platforms like Meta, Google, TikTok, and Amazon,” Inovia partner Karam Nijjar told BetaKit. “As paid ad spending continues to rise, the demand for more content creation and effective creative strategy will only increase. Motion is positioned at the heart of this shift, playing a critical role in fuelling ad spend through data-driven creative insights.”
Today, Motion’s core customers are direct-to-consumer (D2C) e-commerce brands and agencies, which account for roughly 70 percent of its clients today. This group includes brands like HexClad, Vuori, True Classic, Jones Road Beauty, and Ridge. Motion claims its customers use its tools to analyze more than $6 billion in media spend annually.
Image courtesy Motion.
Over the last year, Motion has doubled its headcount from 25 to 50 employees and expanded to serve more than 1,000 customers. Khadjavi claimed that Motion has grown its annual recurring revenue 3x year-over-year, but declined to share the exact figures. Nijjar noted that Motion now supports over 2,000 marketing teams across its customer base, and has experienced strong growth “underpinned by best-in-class performance, adoption, and capital efficiency metrics.”
Khadjavi attributes part of Motion’s growth to its timing. “Five years ago, this was not really a pain point … We’re fortunate to have been at the right place at the right time,” he added.
Amid all the talk about artificial intelligence (AI), Khadjavi said that it has already impacted key functions in the digital advertising world. He noted that in the past, humans spent a lot of time figuring out who to target and how, whereas now, algorithms determine audience targeting. Meanwhile, AI has also made creating ad content much easier.
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In this context, Khadjavi argued that the question of what ads to create—the focus of the creative strategist—has become key, and claimed that the creative strategist has gone from a “relatively fringe” position to “basically the fastest-growing job in performance marketing.”
“Most media buyers don’t spend a lot of time thinking about audience targeting anymore, and they spend now all of their time thinking about creative,” Khadjavi added.
“Motion recognized the opportunity for an emerging creative strategy function in marketing organizations and is pioneering a new category of software to support it.”
Karam Nijjar,
Inovia Capital
Nijjar is joining Khadjavi and Sloan on Motion’s board alongside Taylor Brandt of Headline and former Shopify vice president Brandon Chu as an independent director. The Inovia partner said the firm was attracted to Motion’s strong founder-market fit, vision, and product.
“Motion recognized the opportunity for an emerging creative strategy function in marketing organizations and is pioneering a new category of software to support it,” Nijjar said. “Through our collaborations with the founding team, we have been thoroughly impressed by their articulate vision for Motion to become the command centre for creative strategy.”
With its Series B funding, Motion plans to accelerate its product roadmap and ramp up its go-to-market efforts. Product-wise, Motion plans to focus on its core Creative Analytics product and its new Creative Research offering.
On the go-to-market front, Khadjavi said the startup intends to keep investing in training and education, including through educational content and in-person events such as its Creative Strategist Summit, where it announced the fundraise.
Khadjavi said Motion has also recently been getting a lot of signals from other industries beyond its core D2C e-commerce clients, including business-to-business SaaS companies and consumer apps—groups it is targeting for expansion.
Feature image courtesy Motion.