Companies To Watch
Marketers face a multitude of problems in their quest for better customer engagement and ROI. As the world goes through yet another wave of digital transformation, we can see a democratisation of solutions. In this month’s Companies To Watch Out, we take a look at companies that serve marketers and consumers in various ways. From […]
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Marketers face a multitude of problems in their quest for better customer engagement and ROI. As the world goes through yet another wave of digital transformation, we can see a democratisation of solutions.
In this month’s Companies To Watch Out, we take a look at companies that serve marketers and consumers in various ways. From voice-based advertising to employee experience, these enterprises are revolutionising marketers’ journey.
Instreamatic.ai – The Voice Dialogue Marketing Platform
Founded in 2015
Founders: Stas Tushinskiy CEO and Mikhail Paulkin
How convenient it would be for marketers if consumers themselves chose the ads they want and personalised content. Instreamatic.ai provides that with their technology — marketers can build and automate interactive voice advertising. Ads are published on music streaming apps or podcasts. Instead of a one-way audio ad, the firm’s interactive ad allows users to reply using voice to show their interest in the offer.
Instreamatic is revolutionising the advertising industry by allowing users to speak with ads, gives consumers the power to engage with the content they like by skipping ads that don’t have any significance to them and instead of driving interest towards ads and content that are of value to them. The firm’s Dialogue advertising helps marketers and consumers simultaneously. Consumers get a better ad experience, while advertisers can measure campaign performance and engagement, publishers benefit with higher ad and fill rates. Instreamatic has raised a total of $6.1 million in funding over seven rounds. Their latest funding was raised on Apr 28, 2021, from a Series A round.
PayPhone – Unified Payments System
Founded in 2015
Hassle-free payment systems are always in demand by business owners. Making and receiving payments should not become a pain point for businesses, rather enable them to grow. This is where PayPhone helps marketers and customers alike. PayPhone democratises financial instruments and makes it possible for anyone to make or collect payments from anyone across the globe with just a smartphone –users must download the application on their iOS or Android phone. The facility to make or receive payments without any bank document across seven nations without any transaction fees empowers businesses, especially SMBs that have been hit hard by the pandemic. PayPhone was formed in 2015 to provide a solution to companies or people who needed to pay or recharge stuff, but could not do so due to the lack of POS machines. The company keeps customer data secure and processes it in Microsoft’s Azure cloud.
Khoros
Founded in 2019
Founders: Jack Blaha
Khoros is a global customer engagement software company that provides online community management, social media marketing, social media analytics, digital care, content management software and services to enterprise brands and agencies. Khoros was formed after two software companies — Spredfast and Lithium Technologies — merged in 2019. Lithium Technologies was founded in 2001 and until its merger with Spredfast managed to acquire three organisations that gave an analytical perspective of a brands performance and conversion rate on social media.
Spredfast was founded in 2008 by a group of software engineers and social marketing professionals based out of the US. Spredfast acquired cult status with their annual Smart Social summit that saw social media marketers coming together at one place, discussing issues, and learning from peers and industry leaders. The two firms were acquired by private equity firm Vista Equity Partners. The new entity worked around software, data, and technology-enabled businesses. Khoros has raised a total of $138.1 million in funding over 7 rounds. Their latest funding was raised in January 202, from a Private Equity round.
Also Read: Key Digital Marketing Trends to Watch for in 2021
Affable.ai
Founded in 2017
Founders: Nisarg Shah (CEO, co-founder, Swayam Narain co-founder)
Singapore-based Affable.ai helps marketers run influencer marketing campaigns through a self-service, software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform. The platform uses machine learning (ML) and big data analytics to enable brands and agencies to find influencers, manage and measure campaign performance. It also provides them with data-driven insights to help streamline their micro-influencer strategies throughout the planning, discovery, activation and reporting phases. Affable says it is trying to revolutionise influencer marketing and make it stand out, the same way Google’s Ad word did. Affable.ai tracks more than 3 million influencers across social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok. Affable.ai boasts of an impressive clientele including names like Huawei, Wipro, Pomelo, Fresh, Omnicom, Dentsu, and We Communications.
Placer Labs – Traffic analytics platform
Founded in: 2014
Founders: Noam Ben-Zvi, Zohar Bar-Yehuda, Oded Fossfeld, Ofir Lemel
US-based Placer Labs offers retailers actionable insights related to offline visitors in specific areas. Placer’s product helps marketers in retail, commercial real estate, hospitality and other sectors. The company offers a foot traffic analytics platform for users to generate insights into any physical place to better understand audiences and competition for customers. Placer Labs allows marketers to also check customer visit trends, top-performing locations, and cross-shopping patterns of customers. Placer.ai serves customers in the US and Israel. Placer.ai has raised a total of $113.8 million in funding over 5 rounds. Their latest funding was raised in April 2021 from a Series B round.
Prove.com – Phone-centric identity verifier
Founded in: 2008
Founders: Mike Brody, Rodger Desai
With so many mobile phone users, how are leading financial institutions using it to improve their customer experience and mitigate fraud with so many mobile phone users? US-based Prove has the answer. Prove’s phone-centric identity—sometimes called mobile identity, device intelligence, or phone intelligence— analyses mobile, telecom, bank, and other authoritative signals for digital identity verification, authentication, and fraud prevention. It is a verification system for a single identity authentication platform that reduces complexity and total cost of ownership to create a holistic view of your customer across their entire channels. Prove (formerly Payfone) has raised a total of $198.8 million in funding over eight rounds. The company has acquired three organisations, the most recent one being UnifyID in June 2021.
Also Read: Using AI for Video Marketing
Culturro – Measuring Employee Experience, Preventing Churn
Founded in 2017
Founders: Ashish Manchanda, Abhishek Solanki, Biswaroop Dutta, Riti V. Srivastava
Employee experience is critical to an organisation’s success. It impacts performance and tenure of an organisation the most. Creating the right employee experience is imperative for enterprises. At a time when most companies have remote and hybrid work cultures becoming the new normal, how are organisations ensuring they get meaningful feedback from their employees that can help managers take the right steps to improve output? Culturro makes use of a tech Artificial Intelligence platform that enables companies to measure culture and initiate change. Culturro is primarily a B2B firm that serves clients across Software, FoodTech, SaaS, Services. The startup’s founder Ashish Manchanda in a press interaction said he hoped to raise $1 billion by FY22.
