MParticle is in growth mode. The mobile data platform, which helps collect and connect mobile data across platforms, has added $17.5 million in new funding, just nine months after its $15 million Series A in January.
The round was led by Bain Capital Ventures, a new investor, with participation from existing investor Social Capital, bringing mParticle’s total funding to $37 million.
The mParticle technology aims to help developers, publishers and advertisers reduce the operational complexity around running their app business.
In other words, marketers are sick of their data silos and mParticle allows data to flow between roughly 100 different mobile analytics, marketing and data warehousing vendors; everything from Amazon Web Services and AppLovin to Slack and Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
But it’s not just about mobile data, although that still sits at the heart of mParticle’s offering. Connected TVs, SaaS tools, wearables, the internet of things – basically anything connected – is throwing off data that needs to be woven in with a marketer’s other marketing activities.
“The approach and the application is more holistic because you’re dealing with persistent identities, whereas the web era was all about anonymous data and cookies and pixels – things that just aren’t very relevant today,” said Michael Katz, CEO and founder of mParticle.
A lot of mParticle’s clients are decidedly mobile-first consumer-facing technology companies, like Airbnb, Spotify, Postmates and SeatGeek.
But there’s a big growth opportunity among more traditional brand clients with increasingly relevant consumer apps, like Starwood Hotels, Chik-fil-A, TicketMaster, Saks Fifth Avenue and Staples.
“It’s not just a solution for app-only companies,” Katz said. “Twenty years ago there were the database marketing guys, then came the web analytics tools, and when the ecosystem started to evolve, fragment and mature, we saw the rise of DMPs and tag managers. And now this is the next wave of data infrastructure for modern marketers.”
The money will go toward operations and new hires in sales and engineering. Headcount has doubled in a year to 45 employees. International expansion to EMEA and APAC is also on the horizon.
MParticle also announced a new CRO on Thursday, Max Clark, former VP of sales for the Oracle Social Cloud, and the launch of a new set of APIs allowing clients to query their connected data sets and append them to other platforms, whether that’s an analytics system, a data warehouse, a marketing vendor or a help desk solution.
