Simon Data lands $54M for a ‘fully connected’ customer data platform

New York-based Simon Data, a customer data platform (CDP) provider that mobilizes data assets and helps enterprises personalize end-user experiences, today announced $54 million in a series D round of funding. The company said it will use the capital to further develop its product offering and provide companies with a fully connected, data warehouse-native CDP to work with.

The round, led by Macquarie Capital with participation from several existing investors, comes more than three years after Simon Data’s series C round and takes the total capital raised by the company to well above $100 million. 

With this support, the company plans to help marketers drive ROI and personalize customer experiences while dealing with reduced budgets, new privacy regulations and continuously evolving customer behaviors at the same time.

What makes Simon Data unique?

CDPs have been around for years, enabling marketers to collect and unify data from different sources and power downstream personalization use cases, such as sending a discount coupon just when a customer leaves their cart. Now, the thing is, most of these out-of-the-box solutions are built specifically for martech applications, making them rigid with regard to what information can be accessed. 

At a time when customer behaviors are changing constantly, resulting in complex omnichannel data, marketing teams need ways to work more closely with their organizations’ data teams, rather than with data silos that can’t be integrated into data strategy — and that affect the flow of personalization efforts. 

This is exactly where Simon Data’s CDP comes in. The company provides marketing teams with smart workflows and a no-code user interface to seamlessly integrate with and tap the data they need from their cloud data warehouse, without any ETL or engineering effort.

“Customers who use Simon Data are able to build hyper-targeted audiences, orchestrate experiences (marketing campaigns, automations, etc.) across channels and resolve customer identities — all without their data leaving their cloud data warehouse,” Jason Davis, CEO and cofounder of Simon Data, told VentureBeat. Meanwhile, data teams get a secure way to centralize all the relevant customer information right within the data warehouse.

The offering, built on Snowflake’s architecture, currently supports integration with multiple databases, including Google BigQuery, Amazon RedShift and Postgres. It also supports CRMs and helpdesk platforms like Salesforce, Zendesk and Hubspot. 

Plan ahead

Simon Data has launched a native connected application for Snowflake’s data cloud called IdentityQA. With this round, the company plans to continue this effort and launch connected applications with other cloud data warehouses, turning its offering into a fully connected customer data platform. 

While it has not shared specifics of the plan, platforms like BigQuery and Redshift could be obvious candidates. The company, which achieved over 50% revenue growth last year, continues to work with enterprises such as JetBlue, BARK, TripAdvisor, WeWork, SeatGeek, Venmo, ASOS and Equinox.

 “Simon Data enables us to deeply connect with our users in more profound ways,” Scott Grove, vice president of marketing operations at Vimeo, said. “We’ve experienced a 300% increase in free-trial conversions over the last several years, which is a testament to Simon Data’s ability to individualize and elevate our customer communications.

“Solutions like [Simon Data’s customer segmentation engine] Connected Segmentation empower the marketing team to quickly build segments and deliver personalized messages that consistently resonate,” he added.

Other players targeting the same space are Twilio, Bloomreach, Catalyst and Klaviyo.

Originally appeared on: TheSpuzz