Established in 2008, Vizury is a privately-held CRM company headquartered in Bangalore, India with operations in China, Australia, South East Asia, Japan and South America. The company has recently raised almost USD $9 million in its Series B round of funding. With its flagship product, VRM, Vizury has witnessed 450% growth over the past year. ExchangeWire caught up with Chetan Kulkarni, Co-founder and CEO, Vizury Interactive, to discuss their strategy.

For those unfamiliar with the Vizury offering, can you give us a quick overview?

Vizury is a Digital CRM company. We are all familiar with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and how companies use their customer/prospect data to engage their customers/prospects throughout their purchase cycle. For example, an automotive company would use a walk-in prospect’s data to convert him/her from prospect, to customer, to repeat customer through a variety of marketing activities.

We do the same in the digital world by empowering businesses to use their digital data to engage in a marketing dialogue with their customers and prospects in a 1:1 fashion throughout the online purchase cycle. We call this Visitor Relationship Management (VRM), similar to CRM.

We work with companies across e-commerce – footwear & apparel, consumer electronics, furniture, books, computer hardware peripherals, sporting goods, group buying, daily deals, office products etc., Online Travel – OTA’s, Airlines, Meta search sites etc. and other verticals such as Classifieds, Insurance, Telcos as well.

Vizury currently has a presence in Asia, Europe and South America and our customers include leaders such as Webjet, Virgin Airlines, Expedia, Zuji, Netshoes, Viajanet, Zozo, Kokuken, Ctrip, Yintai, Jabong, Jet Airways and MakeMyTrip.

You recently raised an additional USD $9 million of funding. Can you give some insight into the new round of investment and the investors involved?

The recent Series B round of funding was led by Nokia Growth Partners (NGP), with participation from existing investors Ojas Ventures and Inventus Capital Partners. Existing angel investors who led the seed round of funding also continue to remain invested.

Where will the focus be for this new investment? Market expansion? Building new ad product?

The capital infusion will help us step up R&D efforts, bring new products to market and help us establish ourselves as leaders in our chosen markets. We will look to enhance our platform capabilities by integrating social and mobile. We also intend to focus on localisation and deeper verticalisation of products.

How is Vizury differentiating itself from other retargeting solutions in the market?

Vizury’s VRM solution is completely result driven. We offer a combination of a cutting edge technology platform and an enterprise-class service for sustained long-term results. This is a key differentiator. We forge strategic relationships with our customers and work closely with them to continuously optimise campaigns.

We stand out for four main reasons:

- ROI-centric strategic engagements – Pay-per-result marketing model
- Strong focus on technology – We use technologies like Hadoop to compute and analyse large volumes of Data (Terabytes daily) to draw meaningful insights
- Enterprise-Class Service – Vizury works with customers to provide continuous optimisation, which is critical to deliver sustainable results
- Full service model - Vizury does all the heavy lifting and works in alignment with customers’ business goals.

Is there still a lot of growth in personalised targeting among e-commerce vendors and travel clients in the region?

Yes, we think there is huge potential for growth and this is reflected in our consistent 5x growth every year for the past three years. With other verticals such as Financial Services, Telcos and Automotive embracing personalised targeting, and the clear shift in marketing budgets towards targeted online advertising, we expect further growth.

In terms of the inventory you are running ads across, are you buying directly from regional publishers or buying in real time from exchanges and SSPs?

At Vizury, we follow a ‘Glocal’ inventory strategy. Although a majority of our inventory is coming from RTB, powered by our machine based intelligent bidding system, we also partner with regional publishers helping them grow their pie.

What sort of key trends are you seeing in the RTB market in the region, in terms of available impressions?

We are seeing a gradual increase in the number of available impressions for a given set of users. We believe we are already consuming a double-digit percentage of all RTB impressions in the region. The general increase in awareness for RTB, and the ability to control ad impressions, are no doubt contributing to this increase. Another significant trend is the widening in the range of price bids, which points to the fact that the system is intelligent about which users to bid for and the right price for the impression.

Bangalore seems to be a hub for a lot of innovation in the data-driven ad space with a number of large vendors based there. How has having Bangalore as its engineering hub helped Vizury build its tech solution?

Bangalore has a large talent pool of high-calibre individuals who are keen to work with the latest technology innovation. Access to them has helped Vizury as a company to grow enormously.