Adverity, the rapidly growing marketing analytics platform, today announced it has closed a USD$120m (£86.63m) Series D financing round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, with existing investor Sapphire Ventures also participating in the round.

Adverity’s mission is to transform marketing performance through intelligent data-driven insights. The Vienna-born business– with offices in London and New York– has seen a 120% client uplift in the last 12 months amid an expanding portfolio of global brands and agencies that include: IKEA, Red Bull, Unilever, MediaCom, and Vodafone. This follows the best quarter in company history, a compound annual growth rate of 105% in the past four years, and a rapidly growing global team that has increased in size by 300% since 2019.

With three investment rounds in as many years, the announcement comes less than 16 months after Adverity’s USD$30m (£21.66m) Series C. This latest round brings the company’s total funding to more than USD$165m (£119.15m).

According to research group Market Research Future, the global data analytics market is set to reach USD$132.9bn (£95.94bn) by 2026 amid a growing need for businesses to extract the most value from their data.

Adverity's management team (left to right): Christina Schlesinger (chief customer officer), Andreas Glänzer (chief operating officer), Alexander Igelsböck (chief executive officer), Harriet Durnford-Smith (chief marketing officer), Martin Brunthaler (chief technology officer)

As data privacy and security become an increasingly crucial issue for businesses, demand has only accelerated with the ongoing debate around third-party cookies which threatens to fundamentally change how marketers track performance. At the same time, turbulent market conditions caused by COVID-19 have amplified the pressure on marketers to justify their investments and make fast, accurate, insight-based decisions.

Adverity’s ability to efficiently integrate disparate data sources and deliver goal-orientated insights out of the box has positioned it at the forefront of these changes, enabling companies to effectively use their marketing data to drive growth and avoid getting left behind.

The platform has already pioneered the move towards predictive analytics, where automatic flagging of anomalies, trends and patterns enables marketers to proactively identify and seize emerging opportunities, and address potential problems. In particular, their latest feature, ROI Advisor, has been released as a direct response to data privacy concerns as it allows marketers to track performance without the need for third-party cookies. Proceeds from the investment will evolve its product range to continue adding value on top of data by providing seamless, forward-looking insights and detailed recommendations for the next best marketing steps, in addition to clear oversight of ROI.

Alexander Igelsböck, CEO and co-founder of Adverity, comments: “There is a multitude of marketing tools available but the quantity of new tools that marketers implement doesn’t matter– what matters are the insights that help companies drive growth and avoid missteps. In today’s data-centric climate, every successful company must have data analytics at its core"

“SoftBank Vision Fund 2 recognised the value in our business, understanding that our platform is a critical component for any modern Martech stack. Using automation to do the heavy lifting, marketers can move beyond ‘point in time’ performance data and harness insights that not only power and validate better decisions now, but fuel proactive choices to improve future outcomes".

Ram Trichur, partner for SoftBank Investment Advisers, adds: “With the rapid growth of digital channels available to brands globally, data integration, harmonisation and the use of real time AI, analytics are now a must-have tool to effectively connect with B2C and B2B audiences. Adverity is transforming the marketing analytics sector by making it more insights-driven. We’re excited by the substantial opportunity to scale the platform’s technology and international reach”.