Metigy Secures AU $ 20 Million to Make Online Marketing Easier for Small Businesses – TechCrunch

Metigy, a marketing platform created to help small businesses further automate decision-making in their online advertising campaigns, has raised a Series B of A $ 20 million (approximately US $ 14.6 million). The new funding, led by returning investor Cygnet Capital, will be used to develop the Sydney-based startup’s international customer base, particularly in the United States and Southeast Asia. Other participants in the round included Regal Funds Management, OC Funds, Five V Venture Capital and Thorney, as well as the return

Founded in 2015, Metigy is currently used by approximately 26,000 companies and has partnerships with Google and Optus. About 44% of its customers are in Australia and New Zealand, 26% in South East Asia and 22% in the United States. The startup raised AUD 27.1 million (around $ 19.9 million) in total.

Co-founder and CEO David Fairfull said TechCrunch Metigy was created because “half of SMEs fail in the first two years and marketing is one of the two main reasons for this. It is a global problem and a paradigm that can be changed by harnessing technology.

Fairfull and other members of Metigy’s founding team previously worked at We Are Social, a global creative agency. During their stay, they “spotted an opportunity to give small businesses access to the same strategic data and information” as large marketing teams.

Metigy’s Command Center Marketing Platform

Metigy’s platform provides further support for small or inexperienced marketing teams by using real-time data from their online advertising channels to create a live referral feed. For example, it will tell marketing teams whether to start posting more content immediately, use more hashtags, or schedule more posts. The platforms also predict which posts will drive the most conversions, helping businesses decide how to spend their advertising dollars.

For example, one of Metigy’s clients, the Share with Oscar parking app, used Metigy to analyze social media trends when royals visited Sydney. As a result, Fairfull said it was able to generate 2,700 customer engagements by spending approximately $ 10 AUD (approximately $ 7 USD).

Other social marketing platforms such as Hootsuite and Sprout Social are “essentially process solutions that help make marketing more efficient,” Fairfull said. “However, if you don’t understand marketing, all of this process efficiency isn’t going to help you get results. “

Metigy focuses on the United States and Southeast Asia due to the large number of SMEs located there. By 2022, there are expected to be 30 million SMEs in the United States.

But in terms of volume, Southeast Asia offers a more promising market. “The real growth opportunity for us, however, lies in Southeast Asia, where there are expected to be 150 million SMEs in all 11 markets by 2022,” said Fairfull. But the majority of them don’t have big marketing teams or don’t have access to the kind of ad technology that big companies do. Firms in the region also tend to be more price sensitive, Fairfull added, so artificial intelligence and machine learning-based technology help lower the cost of software like Metigy at an attractive price.