Martech startup Latana has just raised €36 million for its AI-powered brand tracking and customer insights platform. Based in Berlin, the company is on a mission to equip marketers with better tools and insights and is embarking on big, global ambitions.
For marketing teams, having insight into consumers and how they perceive a brand is vital to making decisions, creating campaigns and justifying operations. But, just how can marketers accurately track consumers’ perceptions? Great marketing teams rely on quantitative, data-driven tools and results, but, for those specializing in branding, the tech hasn’t caught up yet.
That is, until now. Latana, a startup headquartered in Berlin, has developed an AI-Powered brand tracking and consumer insights platform which is promising to provide companies with consumer data and key insights to help track brand and campaign performance.
Funding details
Today, Latana has announced it’s raised a €36 million Series B equity and debt financing to scale its SaaS offering – consolidating its position as a market leader in brand tracking.
Since its launch in 2019, Latana has positioned itself as a response to a pressing need for companies to better understand their audiences and brand perception. This new funding was led by Oxx, a specialist growth-stage SaaS investor, with participation from Balderton Capital and Kreos – marking confidence in the company’s product and development.
Providing key brand insights
The martech innovators have a mission: to answer the ‘ultimate question’ for brands – just how are they perceived by the target audience? Latana aims to take any guesswork out of answering this question, giving marketing teams solid data-driven answers.
CEO, Nico Jaspers, explained: “Great marketers thrive on quantitative tools, whether this is for social media management or ad-spend. For too long, brand marketers have been left behind, and have made decisions on ‘gut feeling’, rather than data. Without data, there’s no way to know if campaigns are effective. Brand marketers are left with little idea if they are driving results, or impacting business outcomes. More importantly, companies have no real idea how target audiences perceive their brand.”
“This is our mission. Latana provides a direct channel to consumers that helps brands understand exactly what its key audiences are thinking. With its advanced survey technology, and intuitive data-driven dashboard, Latana provides brand marketers with numbers, and a clear view of campaign success and audience perception.”
Taking a digital approach to brand tracking, Latana is able to track far-reaching insights on consumer behaviour. The startup uses mobile optimized surveys to access both a precise and an “opted-in” audience for authentic and representative brand opinions in 100+ countries and 1000s of cities worldwide, therefore capturing data from a wide demographic and geographic area.
General Partner of Oxx, and Latana board member, Mikael Johnsson said: “With digital now dominating marketing spending, performance marketing and other data-driven tools and techniques have empowered marketeers to make faster and better decisions. However, companies still spend typically 40-60% of their marketing budget on brand marketing which is still largely driven by gut feel and best efforts. Powered by novel sampling methods and advanced statistical processing techniques Latana is disrupting this paradigm by providing brand marketers with accurate, timely and affordable brand marketing data. This provides for an enormous market opportunity and we’re convinced that Nico and the Latana team are in pole position to build a really large company.”
Aside from brand tracking, Latana also uses its technology to understand the underlying forces behind the opinions of people worldwide with special initiatives including the Democracy Perception Index, which is the largest annual study on the global perception of democracies.
The company recently sold part of its original API technology (through Dalia Research) to market research firm PureSpectrum, and is now focusing on scaling its B2B SaaS brand tracking platform. This takes Latana from focusing on both platform API clients and consumer businesses to a solid direction in the B2B SaaS arena servicing consumer companies.
Moving forward, the ambitious startup is planning to scale its marketing and sales operations, grow its consumer-facing product teams, and expand its product offering through R&D. Lantana will also make key Product and Operational leadership hires, in order to further the development of its SaaS offering.
The company services clients globally, and these growth plans will enable Latana to expand both its product offering and its core client base from SMBs to larger organizations, which have been traditionally serviced by larger market research firms.
Jaspers added: “We’re excited to have strong partners on board to scale our software and client base. This investment now enables us to fully focus on developing the next generation of brand analytics and consumer insights.”