ActionIQ on Monday raised a $30 million Series B round led by Silicon Valley VC firm Andreessen Horowitz.
New York City-based ActionIQ is a customer data platform that collects and integrates enterprise data sources.
The round brings ActionIQ’s total funding to about $45 million. The customer data platforms Segment and mParticle, which have raised $109 million and $76 million, respectively, also have announced large funding rounds in recent months.
Customer data platforms aggregate a business’s data with no interest in the data aside from database costs. So ActionIQ is an SaaS company that doesn’t buy media, and while it offers bespoke services for managing first-party data, it wouldn’t perform, say, marketing attribution.
“We are mar tech, but a big difference for us to a typical mar tech business is that we focus on first-party data that’s PII [personally identifiable information, which is verboten in advertising],” said co-founder and CEO Tasso Argyros.
ActionIQ is doing more work around audience segmentation and combining third-party data with a client’s customer base, Argyros said, “but it’s not what we do.”
Survey the mar tech landscape and it becomes clear that “companies have a ton of data – every customer phone call, transaction and touch point – without the means to ingest, compute and do broad processing on that data,” said Martin Casado, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz who’s also taking a seat on the ActionIQ board with the investment.
It’s also where ad tech and mar tech startups are beginning to see more friction with legacy technology companies.
For data-heavy industries like telecommunications or retail, “to build a horizontal layer aggregating all the data in one place and able to do a query across all of it, you would probably need to bring in a systems integrator to build custom around, say, Hadoop,” Casado said. “And it could cost tens of millions of dollars.”
ActionIQ’s pitch is to move and manage that data at a far lower rate, with a startup sensibility over marketing integrations and partnering to compete.
ActionIQ doesn’t build customer identity graphs, for instance, but integrates with cross-channel identity vendors to improve the data quality, Argyros said. Because it is a step removed from media buying, the startup can play nice with marketing clouds, “because they’re focused on integrating products together, not with other vendors out there.”
The marketing department “is providing more and more of the insights that are driving businesses and growth models,” Casado said. “And there aren’t tools right now bringing that data across the organization.”
