Insider Blog
July 19, 2020
Insider’s Biggest Milestone Yet and the Road Ahead
I am incredibly honored and proud to announce the closing of our biggest investment to this day: our $32M Series C round, led by Riverwood Capital and joined by Endeavor Catalyst. Following years of invaluable mentorship we are thrilled to see our existing investors, Sequoia and Wamda, join the round that marks our biggest milestone. We’ve never imagined that our relationship with our investors would come this far. They have been our raving fans who truly owned our success over the years—and this excites me as we are getting ready to sail to new waters with our new partners.
Starting with 6 desks in a tiny home and with great ambitions, we’ve come so far. We proved that if you have a hunger for success and a team of overachievers, it is possible to create a global product company with very limited capital. The past 8 years have been the most incredible journey of my life. I’ve seen our team grow to 550+ people from 41 different nationalities across 24 countries from Japan to Sydney, from the UK to Brazil. Following our aggressive global expansion in APAC, EMEA, and LATAM we are now ready to enter the US market and believe that our fresh solutions to marketers’ biggest pain points will be a major differentiator.
Our Series C round stands for a lot of things that brought us so far.
C Stands for Culture. Since day one, we had plans to expand aggressively. We knew it was going to be full of struggle, and it could not have been possible without a unique team and one-of-its-kind culture. We focused on building a culture of commitment, courage, and care, where continuously coming out of comfort zones became a lifestyle for those who joined our tribe. With the boldest and brightest overachievers from 41 different nationalities, across 24 countries, we built a culture that is unbreakable. And that’s what brought us to this day…
C Stands for Courage. We believed that breakthrough companies can also be created outside of Silicon Valley. We set our minds and hearts to building the most progressive technology company of all time. We focused on outplaying all of our competitors. We set the bar high and struggled like our lives depend on this.
C Stands for Creatives. We always believed scarcity breeds innovation. That’s why we’ve only raised capital when we were ready to raise the bar to a new level. This self-imposed scarcity made us more creative, more resourceful, and more aggressive. Yet, we defied all limits.
C Stands for Constant Growth. We thrive in the struggle, even during crises. We were quick in adapting when the pandemic hit and we kept growing. Our agile digital sales and PST teams positioned themselves to turn the offline traffic that was moving online, into conversions by helping brands respond to ‘net new digital behaviors’ in real-time with the help of our unique AI intent engine. We stood right by our brands. Once again, we got recognized as the #1 leader by G2Crowd for 14 quarters in a row, with a rating of 4.7/5. There is nothing more valuable than our achievements based on 100% user reviews. And we have firmly positioned ourselves on the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Multichannel Marketing Hubs 2020, outplaying all vendors in our space in overall product capabilities. Our team of creatives and hungry overachievers will keep growing to challenge the status quo in Multichannel Experience Orchestration.
C stands for Community & Care. Since our Series A round, our team grew 6X. So did our share‘owners’ program with 80+ members who are recognized based on their outstanding commitment. Our share’ownership’ program is all about care, hard work, impact, and personal growth, not about which school you graduated from or how much experience you have once you join the community. Our ESOP model has been praised and recommended to the portfolio companies of our VCs. With this round, we will be allocating $1M USD to our existing shareholders based on partial cash out options in the next couple of years.
Working closely with marketers across various industries worldwide, we have identified a core problem that holds true for many. There are too many tools that claim to be “multichannel.” Yet, most are not as some channels are truly strong and some remain under-developed. Therefore, most tools end up functioning like point solutions forcing marketers to fill gaps with even more tools. This leaves customer data fragmented across multiple tools creating silos and causes disjointed experiences for consumers, while significantly hindering marketing ROI.
Once we identified this ‘missing’ in the market, we decided to challenge the status quo in multichannel experience orchestration to solve this pain for marketers. With our 250+ engineers, we’ve decided to deliver a strong and truly ‘multichannel’ platform with the widest set of product features so that it becomes the only platform marketers need to orchestrate customer journeys. We backed that up with a robust and flexible AI intent engine that consists of 15+ algorithms that enable marketers to make precise predictions about the future behaviors of logged-in and anonymous users across channels. As a marketer using the Insider platform, you would target users based on their likelihood to convert, buy, and churn — and then design the most optimized experiences accordingly.
I am thankful to our 1000+ partners for their trust, immense support and endless ideas. Together, we’ve built one of the most progressive tech companies of all time and we will continue to be in the frontlines of redefining the future of customer experiences.
Now with the new injection of capital, we will continue investing heavily in our platform and its capabilities to consistently deliver a truly multichannel platform to marketers with emerging channels and latest technologies. Our goal is to become the #1 platform of choice of marketers worldwide
At Insider, we have built one of the most international communities in the B2B tech space and our team will keep growing with creative and daring overachievers. We’ll continue hiring top talent in all regions at a faster pace to maintain our A-player culture globally.
So far, we’ve focused on leading in high-potential markets in the Eastern part of the world. We’ve partnered with industry powerhouses like Samsung, Uniqlo, and Singapore Airlines in APAC as well as Qantas in Australia, and Marks & Spencer, Estee Lauder, and Carrefour in Europe. We plan to grow substantially in our existing 24 countries and we are now getting ready for our US entry.
Our minds are set on becoming the #1 platform of choice of marketers worldwide and we have already set bold plans into motion. We have experienced that great things never come from comfort zones. It takes blood, sweat, and tears to challenge the status quo and to create something beyond expectations. I truly feel that with our exceptional team, partners, and investors, we are unstoppable.
