Audience insights firm GWI said today it has closed on a bumper $180 million Series B funding round led by Permira’s growth fund, bringing its valuation to $850 million.

GWI, incorporated as Trendstream Ltd., claims to be challenging the status quo in the area of market research with its enterprise-friendly data platform that provides quick and easy access to audience insights in almost any industry.

GWI’s platform provides access to data about consumer demographics, preferences and behavioral attitudes in 48 global markets, representing the views of 2.7 billion consumers. The insights it generates, sourced from various surveys and social media platforms, help companies to gain a better understanding of their audiences and use those insights to deliver more compelling products and services.

Company founder and Chief Executive Tom Smith told SiliconANGLE that GWI excels not only in the way it collects its data, but also in how it makes that data available to its customers. He explained that the company sources its data through online surveying at massive scale, using automation to collect, process and publish that information. Automation is key, Smith said, because it allows GWI to obtain its data and get it to analysts much more quickly than would otherwise be possible.

“The immediate availability of data is crucial to revolutionizing market research because businesses need insights in real-time, especially in the digital world where research can quickly become outdated,” Smith said. “This combination of constant data collection and immediate access – via an online platform – solves many of the issues with traditional market research.”

Smith believes traditional market research methods suffer from a number of inefficiencies that prevent companies from obtaining the instantaneous view of their audience that they need to succeed. The industry’s remit is to help companies understand their markets, audience and key customer segments, yet it has collectively failed to do this, he said.

“Take a multimarket setting, the vast majority of traditional market research industry remit requires mind-bendingly large budgets, huge time commitments and an army of expertise just to get a study off the ground,” Smith said. “Imagine you have a market opportunity that spans 20 or 30 countries – this is at least $1 million out of the gate to do properly, and at the true scale needed that budget could keep growing.”

Traditional market research is also agonizingly slow, Smith said, wedded to manual processes and predominantly offline research collection, meaning it can take months to deliver data that quickly becomes outdated in today’s rapidly changing world, he said.

“Competition is rife, and to succeed as a business, you need an intimate understanding of your current markets and audiences and future customer dynamics,” Smith said.

GWI does that not only through its rapid collection and distribution of survey data but by providing companies with an easy way to dig into the information it generates. GWI’s platform can really be thought of as a data explorer that makes it easy to discover audience insights through a range of easy-to-consume visualizations and charts. So a user can quickly dig down into the preferences of any age group and demographic they specify, visualize their findings, and then drop them into a bespoke dashboard to present them to their colleagues.

GWI offers targeted products including GWI USA, which provides insights into U.S. consumers, and GWI Gaming and GWI Sports, targeting specific industries.

The platform has proven popular, with GWI claiming to have tripled its revenue since its $40 million Series A funding round in 2018 while growing its staff to almost 400 employees across its offices in New York, London, Athens and Prague. Some of its highest-profile customers include Google LLC, Spotify Inc., Twitter Inc., Electronic Arts Inc. and Red Bull GmbH.

GWI’s expansion plans will see it expand its coverage to newer markets and capture more data points from consumers, which it will do through innovation in technologies such as machine learning and natural language processing. It also plans to launch products in newer industry and market niches.

“Companies competing in today’s marketplace need instant audience insights and we believe GWI’s modern platform and its globally harmonized data set provides a unique solution to any data storyteller,” said Permira Principal Alex Melamud.

Image: GWI