The Swedish SaaS startup Funnel today announced that it has raised $10 million of Series A funding from Balderton Capital and existing investors Industrifonden and Zobito. Funnel is headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden where it employs 26 people. At the end of 2016 the company opened an office in Boston to address the US market. The funding will be used to develop the Funnel product beyond advertising platforms to any type of marketing data and to continue the company’s expansion in the US and Europe.
Founded in 2014, Funnel is a SaaS business that allows marketers to automate their online marketing data from all platforms in real time, so that they can more accurately analyse their online marketing spend. The startup arose out of a need that it identified for marketers to automate marketing reporting from multiple sources, in order to give a complete picture of online spending that makes effective analysis possible.
Funnel helps companies centralise all their media data in one place, in real time, reducing the time spent analysing information from multiple online marketing platforms or collating data manually. The Funnel platform collects both organic and paid data to a customisable dashboard and helps companies to get a more accurate picture of whether their marketing activity is performing. Customers say it makes their marketing teams more accountable and some credit Funnel for giving them gains of at least 30% on their business objectives.
Funnel helps its customers report on over $1billion of annual advertising spend and clients include some of the Europe’s fastest growing e-commerce businesses including Farfetch, Made.com, Daniel Wellington, NA-KD and Footway. US e-commerce companies including Article and Northern Brewer, and Fintech companies including iZettle and CrowdCube also use the software, as do media agencies. Having found success with its data tools for online spending, Funnel is now developing its software to automate data collection for all types of marketing data.
Fredrik Skantze, co-founder and CEO of Funnel, said: “Across the world marketers have relied on spreadsheets to analyse their spending and present weekly marketing reports. But spreadsheets are slow, ineffective tools for the job and as the number of ad platforms grow have become cumbersome and error prone. Funnel replaces the spreadsheet with software that is automated and always up to date. We provide data extraction as a service. We believe there is a potential new category that can be created here that will change the way marketers work for good and we want to be the leader of that category.”
Funnel already connects to 250 different advertising platforms. Customers can use the data however they want, either using Funnel’s own dashboard tool or having it sent to data warehouses like BigQuery and Redshift. The Funnel product also works with Google Analytics, Google Data Studio and Google Sheets.
Suranga Chandratillake, general partner at Balderton Capital, will join the board of the Stockholm-based business as part of the fundraising. He stated: “Every day, more and more businesses, both tech and traditional, spend more of their marketing spend online. The number of channels that companies can use to advertise is only set to grow. Companies that can aggregate and analyse this data can benefit from massive opportunities to both reduce cost and also increase effectiveness of their marketing spend. There is a growth of specialized marketers who do just this in many companies and Funnel is a key enabler for these people. It allows marketers to create a single place that contains all a company’s marketing data, fully normalised and ready for analysis.”
What sets Funnel apart is that it is compatible with any advertising platform a customer uses. Even if the platform is not currently supported by Funnel, it can be added immediately at no additional cost. Other software products either offer a limited set of supported platforms or offer tools that require a developer or technical person to help with the integration. This means that marketing teams cannot get automated access to their data.