Insider raises $500M in funding for its personalized marketing platform

Insider, an Istanbul-based startup that helps brands customize their marketing campaigns based on buyer preferences, has raised $500 million in a late-stage funding.

The Series E round was announced today. Insider said that growth equity firm General Atlantic led the raise. The investment comes about 18 months after the software maker secured $105 million at a valuation approaching $2 billion.

Insider provides a cloud platform that enables companies to log their shoppers’ buying preferences and personalize their marketing efforts accordingly. An electronics retailer, for example, can use the software to detect when shoppers visit a section of its e-commerce catalog that features laptops. It could then send those shoppers a coupon for computer accessories to encourage purchases.

Insider’s software is powered by a built-in customer data platform, or CDP. This is a marketing tool that aggregates a company’s customer records in a centralized repository and organizes them into a format that lends itself to analysis. The CDP can collect records from advertising services, analytics tools and other third-party applications.

While ingesting customer records, the software removes duplicate entries that may lower the quality of the dataset. The CDP also alerts users when one of the connectors it uses to collect information from external applications encounters issues.

After moving their company’s customer records into Insider, marketers can use the data to create so-called buyer segments. A retailer could, for example, create a segment that includes repeat buyers who visit its website regularly but haven’t made a purchase in at least a week. It can then use Insider’s platform to display a personalized promotion for all the buyers who meet those criteria.

The platform can display marketing offers to users when they visit a certain section of an e-commerce catalog. According to Insider, its platform is also capable of distributing promotions via a website’s search bar, WhatsApp and about a dozen other channels.

Insider has equipped its platform with a suite of machine learning features dubbed Sirius AI to save time for marketers. The technology can automatically create buyer segments and identify the best way of delivering promotions to customers in those segments. Sirius AI also promises to speed up other tasks, such as the process of running A/B tests to determine which version of an ad is most effective at driving sales.

“Unlike traditional technology companies that focus on a single area or product, our approach has always been to build multiple best-in-breed and industry-leading products, bringing them together in one complete platform that outperforms single-point solutions,” said co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Hande Cilingir. 

Insider says its platform is used by more than 1,500 companies including Nike Inc., Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and other major brands. The software maker will use the proceeds from its latest funding round to further grow its market presence. It also plans to hire more employees and develop new artificial intelligence features. 

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