UPDATED 12:52 EDT / DECEMBER 21 2016

BIG DATA

Dynamic Yield raises $22M to make marketing more personal

A custom advertisement or targeted piece of content can go a long way toward winning over an online shopper, but the large volume of traffic that e-commerce companies receive makes it difficult to provide a personalized experience for every visitor.

Dynamic Yield Inc. has taken it upon itself to ease the task. To fuel its work, the startup has closed a $22 million financing round led by Israeli fund ClalTech and Vertex Venture Holdings, which lists Silicon Valley giants such as Facebook Inc. in its portfolio. They were joined by nearly a half-dozen other backers, including Baidu Inc., the top search engine in China.

The investment follows several years of rapid growth for Dynamic Yield, which has seen its workforce at least double in size annually. Vertex Ventures General Partner Aviad Ariel told SiliconANGLE that in a “noisy and crowded” marketing tech business, the company set itself apart from rivals a number of ways. It offers a “holistic” approach to reaching consumers across marketing channels, he said, and its has a data platform that enable better targeting. Not least, he added, it has demonstrated some success with customers.

According to a blog post today by Chief Executive Liad Agmon, the journey began all the way back in 2009, a full two years before he launched the startup with cofounder Omri Mendellevich. The entrepreneur served as the head of Sears, Roebuck & Co.’s personalized marketing efforts at the time and faced a frustrating problem: He had to use multiple tools to customize the different elements of his employer’s online operations.

The issue continues to hamper the productivity of marketing professionals today. Dynamic Yield offers to remedy the situation with a cloud-based platform that packs a “unified” set of capabilities for managing personalization campaigns. According to the startup’s website, its toolkit supports everything from A/B tests for comparing different designs to individually targeted promotions.

An airline, for instance, could use Dynamic Yield to put a banner on its website that advertises flights from the specific city where a visitor resides. And retailers can deliver similarly fine-grained product recommendations based on user shopping preferences. The startup says that promotions are delivered using machine learning algorithms that can quickly analyze new data about visitors and make adjustments in real-time.

Dynamic Yield further claims that its technology lends itself not only to customizing a company’s own websites but also promotions delivered via other channels, notably email and third-party advertising networks. “Most companies have websites, mobile apps, Facebook pages, etc., and they communicate with their users over email, push notifications, social media, etc.,” said Ariel. “Most competitors focus on one of these – some companies focus on email, push notifications and so on, while Dynamic Yield provides marketers the ability to manage everything from a single place.”

The startup’s value proposition has evidently struck a chord in the marketplace: Its platform is used at Under Armour Inc., Rolling Stone, Jewelry.com and hundreds of other brands.

Today’s funding is intended to enable Dynamic Yield to widen the adoption of its platform even further. Agmon said that one of his main priorities will be expanding his startup’s development team, which already constitutes more than half of its workforce.

With reporting from Robert Hof

Image via Pixabay

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