We are delighted to introduce an exciting new partner in Permira’s tech portfolio. mParticle, a leading Customer Data Platform (CDP) that provides foundational customer data infrastructure, became part of Permira’s fast-growing family of tech leaders on October 5th when Permira’s growth fund led the company’s $150 million Series E round. The company has a powerful platform that helps clients unlock the value of their consumer data to enable downstream use cases across the organization (such as segmentation, marketing automation, lifecycle optimization, etc.) – incredibly important considering the many sources of first-party data that exist and across a range of metrics.
Why are we excited?
As e-commerce comes of age, the consumer’s digital experience becomes paramount to the success of every business. There is no shortage of customer data, but good data – data that’s accurate, timely, and suitably formatted – is especially valuable and very hard to come by. mParticle, leveraging its strong heritage working with customer data from mobile devices and its leading web and ingest capabilities, centralizes customer data collection, quality management, and customer identity for customers through its platform at the infrastructure layer of the client’s technology stack.
The secret sauce in mParticle’s customer data infrastructure is the way it unlocks valuable customer data to enable teams across an organization drive their most critical business use cases – whether that’s personalizing their messaging, optimizing retention and customer lifecycle management, or seamlessly orchestrating complex marketing automation campaigns. And the company’s platform is uniquely equipped to deliver value with its category-leading feature set across ingestion, integration, governance, and security.
mParticle helps companies produce great customer experiences by combining and interpreting information from disparate sources to offer customers an industry-leading customer experience.
In addition to reconciling customer data from multiple sources, the challenges of securing quality customer data are being compounded by the growing body of law requiring effective privacy controls. mParticle is architected to empower brands to meet current GDPR compliance standards, taking into account the evolution of customer relationships and increasing concern around protecting customer privacy.
CDPs are growing at scale
The importance of the consumer digital experience accelerated tremendously during the pandemic as customer buying habits were abruptly reshaped. Today, it is widely understood that the transition from in-person to online transactions will remain an enduring fixture of 21st century commerce.
As a result, mParticle saw its growth explode. Its new annual recurring revenue grew by 50% in 2020 and is forecast to accelerate to more than 100% in 2021. With the additional Series E funding, the company will expand its go-to-market efforts as well as its R&D to meet the growing demand for customer data infrastructure.
Improving customer data maturity to enhance customer satisfaction and business outcomes is a horizontal issue that affects both product and service companies. Indeed, one of the things we are particularly attracted to is that mParticle isn’t tied to any vertical. The problems it solves are ubiquitous, crossing industry lines and including such familiar brand names as NBC Universal, Giant Eagle, Route, Airbnb, Drybar, Dave and Buster’s and many more – all of which are current mParticle clients.
Oh, and one more thing! True to our DNA, we were able to develop a great relationship with CEO Michael Katz and his team in the months preceding our due diligence efforts. That’s what made it clear to us that his company was not just seeking financial backing; they wanted to partner with people who had experience investing in the space. Permira’s global expertise and network provides powerful evidence to support that case. We are thrilled to lead this investment and look forward to driving mParticle’s market expansion.
