Today we announced that we raised $50M from Tiger Global Management, Goldman Sachs, Declaration Partners (an investment firm backed by David Rubenstein), Madera Technology Partners, Madrona Venture Group, and investor Lee Fixel. This brings our total funding to $87M since Amperity was founded three and a half years ago.
Every day since has been an adrenaline-infused, intellectually-stimulating, caffeine-powered thrill. It’s an honor to be on this journey with this extraordinary team. When you look at every single spot on the field, we have the best player in every position, each bringing their own passion to support our users in using data to serve the customer in a way that’s never been possible. This alignment of people and focus feels rare, and I’m so incredibly thankful and lucky to have the opportunity to get better every day by being challenged and pushed by the very best.
Beyond having a chance to work with the best, what fuels those of us at Amperity is our unmatched community of customers. We get to work with some of the largest and most admired companies on the planet. And as great as these companies are, it’s the people in these organizations who are the innovators and visionaries that have paved the way for Amperity to be able to deliver value to their companies. Many of you made big bets on us: I will never forget the “you know, if this doesn’t work, heads will roll…” conversations. You know who you are. You make every step of the Amperity journey worthwhile and are the reason we wake up each day excited to come to work. I really mean that. You have inspired us and we’re thankful for your partnership, support, and push to keep getting better.
It feels like it was just yesterday that Derek Slager and I raised a $9M Series A in February 2016, before we had even written a line of code. Madrona Venture Group, who focuses on strategic investments in the Pacific Northwest, understood the problem we wanted to solve and the pain points that would be alleviated for consumer brands worldwide. If it were not for their belief in us and the large, unsolved problem we wanted to tackle, we would have never built Amperity, giving brands, for the first time, a complete and comprehensive view of the customer that can power any system. We are so grateful for their incredible partnership and support.
Our first 18 months were focused on building the core components of the Amperity engine and solving several deep technical challenges. And there were many moments along the way when we felt like maybe this thing was just not going to work, as I recount in this Problem Solver’s Podcast. We rolled out v1.0 to the public in September 2017 with the support of two forward-thinking companies, Alaska Airlines and Moët Hennessy USA. While these two companies could not be more different in their core businesses, they shared two qualities: a long history of being first-to-market in the most innovative areas of their respective businesses, and having change agents in the company who had both the passion and the foresight to make bold bets to propel their businesses forward. We are forever indebted to those teams for helping us formulate and refine an approach that would allow every consumer brand around the world to use data to serve their customers.
About a month after the launch of v1.0, I was introduced to Lee Fixel who was at Tiger Global. Lee and the team at Tiger have vast experience with both enterprise software businesses like ours, and consumer businesses like the ones we aspire to serve. They recognized the problem we had solved, and in turn, the value we could create, leading to the close of our $28M round. At the end of that year the team doubled as did our customer base, and now just a year and a half later, the team has tripled and our customer community has grown exponentially.
What energizes me the most is our leadership in substantiating the power of this capability with independent research like this Forrester Total Economic Impact Report that found our customers consistently achieving 10X ROI in the first year. These kinds of results are not normal. I attribute it to why Amperity is so unique: our focus on the core, not the edge, where improvements to the underlying customer data itself — and the quality of that data — can be connected and used anywhere, giving outsized results.
We feel like we have a responsibility to help as many consumer brands as possible use data to serve the customer. This is the first time in history that a company can be built where alignment between us, our customers, and consumers can be 100%. It’s time to put the consumer first, giving brands the tooling to own their relationship with those consumers and not have to rely on third-party data marketplaces or sketchy data privacy practices. We feel like we have demonstrated our ability to help people use data to serve the customer in a way that is unmatched. And now it’s time to accelerate all the incredible things we want to build, and all the amazing customers we want to serve.
I’m so proud of everyone in the Amperity community — our team, our customers, our partners, and our friends — and all that we have accomplished together in such a short period of time. We have a huge head start in what I believe will be the most highly coveted space in enterprise software, and we are now positioned to accelerate that lead. The best part is, we are still at the very beginning of this journey. Our mission to help people use data to serve the customer is one that will propel us for a very long time, and today feels like day one all over again. Let’s go.
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