London-based Ikue, a Customer Data Platform (CDP) built for telcos, announced on Wednesday, November 9, that it has raised £2.25M (approximately €2.56M) in a Seed round of funding from private investors.
Ikue says its CDP is designed to solve the unique challenges of the telecoms market and is based on decades of direct experience by a team of senior telecoms technologists and marketers.
Capital utilisation
Ikue says it will use the funds in developing its Customer Data Platform for midsize telecom operators worldwide. The startup will also use the investment to fund new staff recruitment and for international sales and marketing activity.
Bronwynne Stoddart, Ikue co-founder and CEO, says, “The Ikue CDP has been designed and built from the ground up by a team of telecom experts with a combined 25+ years experience in the telecoms industry. The opportunity we offered for investors to join the seed investment round was to support the acceleration of the current prototype version to a fully operational revenue-generating minimum viable product (MVP): and also to help scale the business.”
“We are delighted to have not only hit but exceeded our investment target, and thank our new and existing investors for their support and confidence in the Ikue proposition and the technology behind it,” adds Stoddart.
“A product to solve the unique challenges of the telecoms market”
Founded by Bronwynne Stoddart and Stuart Stoddart, Ikue is a marketing technology company that innovates with customer data to power personalisation for telecom operators. The company’s main purpose is to enable mass personalisation for marketing, which sets it apart from corporate programmes like CRM and generalist CDPs.
Ikue’s Customer Data Platform is the first CDP built for telcos that stitches customer data together with super low latency events in a single location to enable the execution of personalised marketing, sales, and service messages at the right time and in the right channel.
The cloud platform provides data science/ML capabilities for quick building and deployment of analytics and comes pre-configured with interfaces to widely used data and marketing activation apps. It can also resolve cross-domain identification.
Stoddart says, “In a post-pandemic environment, operators must maximise new revenue streams and accelerate the digitisation of processes and customer touchpoints to manage costs and improve margins. Operators growth strategies are focused on connectivity and new services. They must adopt a data-driven approach to targeting consumers to achieve these growth objectives and deliver better margins. This will allow them to justify CAPEX investments to support the demand for increased connectivity and superior customer experiences.”
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