The market for Customer Data Platforms is growing. According to a recent report, the global Customer Data Platform (CDP) market size is expected to grow from $2.4B (nearly €2B) in 2020 to $10.3B (approx €8.5) by 2025, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 34 per cent during the forecast period. The report suggests that the driving factors behind this massive growth are “increasing spending on marketing and advertising activities by enterprises, changing landscape of customer intelligence, the proliferation of customer channels, automated smart machines to drive consumer experience.”
Furthermore, as per the report, the increasing investments and fundings in CDP startups is another major factor contributing to the growth of the global CDP market. Indicative of the above-mentioned factor, Belgian Customer Data Platform Journy.io has just raised funding.
Funding
Journy.io has received a €450,000 investment from Flanders Investment Company PMV, Amsterdam-based venture capital firm Peak Capital, and serial tech entrepreneur Willem Delbare. The investment will be used to accelerate current AI development, as well as build out the core marketing and customer success teams for further growth.
PMV (Participatiemaatschappij Vlaanderen) is a Flemish investment company that invests in “promising companies from the very start, up to and including growth and internationalisation.” It claims to offer financial solutions to all entrepreneurs with a good business plan and a strong management team. It does this with capital, loans and guarantees. “In addition, with and for the government, and other partners, it realises projects that are important for prosperity and well-being in Flanders. PMV has a portfolio of €1.3B under management,” mentions the company.
Amsterdam-based Peak Capital is a European investment fund founded and funded by experienced entrepreneurs. Peak Capital offers smart venture capital to European fast-growing early-stage marketplace, platform, and SaaS companies.
Peak Capital manages €84M and has made 28 investments to date including IENS, which was sold in 2014 to TripAdvisor; Radionomy, which was acquired in 2015 by Vivendi; and CheapCargo, which was purchased in 2016 by PostNL.
Johan van Mil, co-founder and managing partner at Peak Capital, says, “As a founder of data companies myself, I see a big opportunity for consumer and business-orientated companies to make their own data much more intelligent and actionable. And we believe that Yves and Hans are the right ones to capture this opportunity.”
Willem Delbare is a serial tech entrepreneur, former co-founder Teamleader and an early investor in Journy.io.
Journy.io’s journey
Hans Ott and Yves Delongie co-founded Journy.io during summer 2019. The duo met during an assignment to build out front- and back-end systems for Belgian green-energy marketplace ‘Bolt Energie’. During the first 6 months, the company transitioned its original idea into creating the easiest and smartest customer data platform (CDP) for the mid-market, adding AI-features to generate behavioural customer intelligence.
Journy.io is a cloud-based Customer Data Platform (CDP) to provide more and better customer data to marketing, sales, and customer support teams. Ott explains, “If you look at today’s tools, customers are typically represented by their name, the company they work at, their phone number, their email… and maybe some additional fields people submit through a contact form on your website. Yet, there are no fields giving you a precise idea of which products or features that person is likely interested in; what channels and ads will be most successful in creating return visits to your website, what specific content was consumed as part of the buying journey; what type of buyer persona that person belongs to; or simply how likely she/he will be buying your product or service.”
The platform provides GDPR-compliant contextual and behavioural (artificial) intelligence for all accounts and users. According to the company, “Journy.io injects native app data and customer intelligence as simple custom fields in a company’s existing tech-stack, like CRMs, marketing automation tools, and other customer support apps. Teams can continue their work in their familiar environments but with much more actionable account and user data. This helps companies convert more, sell more, and churn less.”
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