Permira leads $150m investment in mParticle

mParticle, the leading customer data infrastructure company, today announced that it has raised $150 million in Series E funding, led by Permira’s growth fund which backs leading tech-enabled and digital businesses.

The existing investor base also participated in the round alongside new backers including former Adobe CFO Mark Garrett and New England Patriots All-Pro punter Jake Bailey. The funding will support mParticle’s continued global go-to-market expansion, as well as significant R&D investment as demand for customer data infrastructure continues to accelerate. With the round, Daniel Brenhouse, Principal at Permira, will join the mParticle Board of Directors.

Creating truly adaptive, privacy-friendly digital experiences is becoming a universal brand mandate, but companies wrestle with several customer data challenges that inhibit success. Solving challenges around data quality, governance and connectivity are the precursor to making sure that digital experiences are relevant & personalized, as well as privacy compliant.

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mParticle enables businesses to easily manage the immense growth of data volumes moving to and from sources, systems, API’s and applications. Using a single API, developers, product managers and marketers can manage customer data along the entire product and customer life cycle while also addressing challenges such as data quality and governance. Additionally, mParticle accelerates the time to value realization by facilitating real-time syncing of customer data to over 300 analytics and marketing APIs.

“The acceleration of customer data connectivity is helping drive the digital economy to new heights,” said Michael Katz, CEO of mParticle. “These days, teams are trying to do more with less and the brands that are winning are focused on improving the trust quotient with their customers by creating better interactions driven by better data, privacy controls and open ecosystem approach. Our partnership with Permira and the latest funding will help us deliver the solution to these challenges, to more brands, at a rapid global scale.”

In the wake of COVID-19, as digitization has accelerated and consumer behavior has permanently changed, mParticle has experienced rapid growth, helping teams implement and deliver innovative customer data strategies. New ARR grew approximately 50% in 2020 and has accelerated to over 100% year over year in 2021.

Improving data maturity within an organization has shown to materially impact growth for mParticle’s customers. Household brand names such as NBCUniversal, Giant Eagle, Route, Airbnb, Drybar, Dave and Buster’s and hundreds of other leading brands have all selected mParticle to implement and execute their customer data strategies. mParticle’s customer data infrastructure helps these teams improve personalization by connecting the right data to the right systems in real-time.

“mParticle is solving a foundational data quality problem facing marketing organizations. We are thrilled to lead this investment as Michael, Andrew and the team look to supercharge their phenomenal track record of innovation in a rapidly expanding customer data platform market,” said Daniel Brenhouse, Principal at Permira. “Many of Permira’s most sophisticated consumer-facing companies are major promoters of mParticle and we are beyond excited to back the widespread adoption of its technology into organizations across sectors and sizes,” he continued.

Chris Caguin, Investment Professional at Permira, further noted: “mParticle is a pioneer in customer data infrastructure and we’re excited to lead the Series E financing. mParticle is the future of the CDP market with its unique best-in-class platform; enterprise-grade capabilities; and an industry-leading feature set across integration, ingestion, security and governance. We’re excited to partner with Michael and his team to accelerate the company’s product roadmap, growth initiatives, and continued innovation.” Chris will join the mParticle Board of Directors as a Board Observer following the transaction.

“Gartner’s 2020 Marketing Technology Survey finds that marketer adoption of customer data platforms (CDPs) continues to grow: 87% of respondents fully deployed or are deploying a CDP, up from 74% in 2019,” according to Gartner ®. “Emerging factors such as the decline of third-party cookies intensify the already urgent need for marketing to bridge the customer data management gap.” It is further stated in the report, “Among surveyed martech leaders with a CDP, respondents with only a marketing cloud CDP reported the lowest levels of overall martech stack effectiveness.” Gartner adds that “Marketers report high utilization of CDP capabilities, yet “lack of a customer data foundation” remains a top impediment to success. This underscores CDP vendors’ struggle in delivering against the expectation of unified customer data.”

Unlike other CDPs, marketing clouds and generic data pipelines, mParticle helps teams properly address the nuanced nature of customer data in an ever changing technology ecosystem. As teams move beyond third party cookies and create more durable, privacy-friendly strategies, they have the opportunity to create a data flywheel where better data leads to better personalization leading to more engagement and richer data. Addressing the underlying needs around data quality, governance and connectivity is the precursor to creating compounding effects through the organization that benefit the entire enterprise rather than a single team.

Source: Press Release