Global partnership management platform provider Impact Tech Inc. is looking to expand after raising $150 million in funding.

Today’s private equity funding round was led by Qatar Investment Authority and Providence Public, bringing Impact’s valuation to $1.5 billion.

Impact says its Partnership Cloud platform is designed to help brands shift from traditional advertising methods to more meaningful ways of reaching out to consumers. It helps companies to aggregate, orchestrate and optimize partnerships with affiliates, social media influencers, content publishers and more through a single, unified portal.

Using the Impact Partnership Cloud, companies can discover and recruit potential partners to promote their products and services, negotiate contracts and handle payments and then track the value those partners provide. The platform also provides tools to help companies better engage with their partners. There are monitoring tools too, so companies can keep track of how successful their partnerships are, protect themselves against bad actors that may attempt to defraud their partnership programs and ensure that partners follow their guidelines.

Impact Chief Executive David A. Yovanno told SiliconANGLE that brands are increasingly looking to move away from traditional forms of advertising, especially internet-based targeted advertising that has become notorious for following consumers around the web. He said studies show that 69% of people no longer trust these kinds of ads, especially if they slow page-loading times.

“The advertising landscape has also been majorly disrupted by big tech security and privacy updates such as removal of third-party cookies which has fundamentally changed how businesses operate,” Yovanno said.

Impact believes that as more companies reject traditional advertising methods, partnering with social media influencers and the like is an obvious new avenue to explore, and one that has been very successful for many brands already. The company points to a recent study that shows how partnerships have contributed to as much as 28% of some businesses overall revenue, for example.

As businesses engage with more partners, Yovanno said, it makes sense for them to consider using a dedicated platform for managing all of those relationships. He told SiliconANGLE that it has been well-established that automation helps drive efficiency and maximize effectiveness in just about every type of business operation.

“In many companies, partnerships teams are siloed, so influencer marketing may be managed by a PR group while channel partnerships tend to live in sales or business development,” Yovanno said. “This creates inefficiencies; different groups in an organization may have different objectives, systems, audiences and so on. There should be one consolidated tool where these groups can discover new partners, contract, communicate, measure, track, pay and optimize to see which partnerships are driving real value for the organization.”

People seem to agree, as Impact has already found a big market for its Partnership Cloud, with an impressive roster of clients that boasts six of the top 10 retailers in the U.S. Its clients include names such as Uber Technologies Inc., Shopify Inc. and Walmart Inc., which use the Impact Marketplace to discover and recruit new partners.

Impact has been busy trying to expand the scope of its platform too, acquiring startups including Affluent Inc., Trackanomics Ltd. and Activate Holdings Inc. in the past year. Most recently, Impact was announced as a Certified App Partner for influencer and affiliate marketing for Shopify Plus.

Looking ahead, Impact said the company will use today’s funding to accelerate its investments in partnership automation innovation, increase its channel partnerships and scale its go-to-market efforts.

Image: Impact