Customer data management company Amperity Inc. has joined the unicorn startup club after raising $100 million in a late-stage funding round that takes its market value to more than $1 billion.

HighSage Ventures led today’s Series D round, with participation from existing investors Tiger Global Management, Declaration Partners, Madrona Venture Group and MaderaTechnology Partners, bringing its total amount raised to $187 million.

Amperity has built a cloud-based data management platform that’s focused on customer records. Enterprises collect a lot of information about their customers, but the sheer weight of that data means they struggle to understand it. Amperity’s platform is designed to help them analyze that data and make more sense of it.

To do so, Amperity pulls information from customer databases, point-of-sale systems in stores and other sources, then stitches it into a more cohesive whole. Then, it uses artificial intelligence algorithms to reconcile that data. So if there are two customer entries in different systems that have identical personal details that describe the same person, it will combine those records to create a more detailed profile.

Liz Miller, an analyst with Constellation Research Inc., told SiliconANGLE that Amperity’s data ingestion tools are a key differentiator for its platform. It provides an agnostic architecture that’s able to ingest raw data from any source, without modifying that data or requiring a pre-determined schema. It makes data aggregation much more scalable and flexible, she explained.

“What this really translates into for teams battling the customer experience wars is that any customer data can now be pulled in for a more comprehensive view of an individual customer’s behaviors and signals,” Miller continued.

Companies can organize customer profiles into audiences and query those users based on factors such as geography or shopping preferences. The platform also has integrations that make it possible for marketing teams to export Amperity data to third-party analytics tools and advertising systems, where it can be acted on.

Amperity reckons the economic transformation that followed the COVID-19 pandemic has made it more important that ever for retailers to know and understand their customers, especially as more people shop online and generate more actionable data than ever before. Amperity co-founder and Chief Executive Kabir Shahani said the ability for retailers to derive insights and take action based on them is a key requirement for most consumer brands today.

“Our core belief is that brands need the tools to own the relationship with their customers,” he said. “To enable this we invented technology that identifies customers, understands their interests and develops analytics to predict their intent.”

Consumer brands seem to agree. In the last year, the company has expanded its customer base to include the likes of Williams-Sonoma Inc., Tapestry Inc., Under Armour Inc., the Smithsonian Institution, Jackson Family Wines Inc. and Airstream Inc. They join brands such as Starbucks Corp., The Home Depot Inc. and The Kroger Co., which also use Amperity’s platform.

For all its success so far, Miller said Amperity faces a tough road ahead as the customer data platform space has grown increasingly competitive, with established customer experience platform providers such as Salesforce.com Inc. and SAP SE pushing their own alternatives. Miller added that the space is further complicated with the arrival of Twilio Inc., which acquired Segment Inc. for $2.3 billion in 2020, Acquia Inc., which bought a startup called AgileOne to bring CDP to its Drupal-based suite, and Adobe Inc., which in 2019 launched its real-time CDP platform with specific business-two-business functionality.

“For organizations looking to deliver customer engagements that are personalized and contextual, data is still the primary road-block as the age-old dilemma of how to normalize structured and unstructured data across a rapidly increasing digital landscape rages on,” Miller said. “The CDP has emerged as the tool that fills the data gaps made by CRM and systems of engagement.”

Amperity said it will use the capital from today’s raise to grow its sales and marketing teams, expand internationally and invest in research and development with an eye to helping companies innovate more using their customer data.

Image: Amperity