Lithuania-based Affise, a marketing platform for building business partnerships, has raised $8M (approx €6.5M) in its Series A round of funding. The round was led by Leta Capital with the participation of TMT Investments.
Use of the funds
The raised capital will enable the company to expand its product suite to increase its presence in North America, LatAm, and SEA, as well as cement its leadership in Europe, Israel, and India.
Stanislau Litvinau, CEO and co-founder of comments, “Partnerships management is becoming the vital component of the marketing technology stack. Our commitment to representing the marketers’ interests has gained the trust of the world’s leading agencies and networks, and we see significant potential to capture an additional opportunity in the market. One strategy we’re aiming to complete with this funding is entering the adjacent market of direct advertisers and brands, empowering them to grow their marketing channel with affiliate programs.”
What does Affise offer?
The company was founded in Vilnius, Lithuania in 2016, by Dmitri Zotov and Stanislau Litvinau. Affise is a partnership marketing platform for brands, advertisers, and agencies that help them automate and scale their partner relations via all possible performance marketing channels such as traditional affiliates, influencers, networks, and agencies.
Affise has doubled its revenue every year and now employs over 120 people in six offices around the world. “We can see that performance marketing becomes essential across many new channels which were difficult to measure until recently,” said Alexander Chachava, managing partner at Leta Capital.
The company currently has offices in Lithuania, Israel, India, China, Belarus, and Cyprus, and plans to increase its presence in North America by establishing an office in the USA.
Soon to complete SOC 2 exam
The company mentions in a statement that it also aims to soon complete the SOC 2 examination of security controls. SOC 2 is an auditing procedure that ensures your service providers securely manage your data to protect the interests of your organisation and the privacy of its clients.
Soc 2, pronounced “sock two” and formally known as Service Organisation Control 2 reports on various organisational controls related to security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, or privacy. For security-conscious businesses, SOC 2 compliance is a minimal requirement when considering a SaaS provider.
Affise works with over 1,000 customers, including leading brands and agencies such as Wargaming, Xapads, Hypercentage, Kismia, Mobavenue, GroupM, Zorka.Mobi, Appalgo, and Mobligent, among others. The company boasts connections of over 300,000 partners to accelerate its business growth.
Market growth
As the partnership marketing industry continues an impressive growth of 10 per cent, every year, its 2021 value is estimated to reach $1.2B.
Dmitri Zotov, CTO and co-founder of Affise believes, “The market evolution from traditional affiliates to new performance channels (influencers, brand-to-brand and other), along with the skyrocketing growth in e-Commerce in 2020, will encourage more small and medium advertisers to launch their own affiliate programs.”
He further continues, “This trend will generate demand for technological solutions which allow them to start and manage affiliate programs from scratch and achieve incremental growth. Thus, this funding round will enable us to follow Affise’s mission of empowering marketers with the tools needed to catapult their success and make accurate strategic decisions. This will undoubtedly drive innovations and transparency across the industry.”