Origami Logic, a startup that has created a way for marketers to analyse, visualise and glean insights from the disparate and often impenetrable big data collected by their companies, is today announcing that it has picked up another $15 million in funding, led by Jafco Ventures with participation from existing investors Accel and Lightspeed. Origami Logic is still in stealth mode but that’s not because it hasn’t finished developing its product yet. It has, and it has been quietly picking up customers that are now commercially deploying it. CEO and cofounder Opher Kahane tells me the plan is aim for a more public launch “at some point later this year.”
All the same, it’s the early customer wins that have helped with securing this new investment. “Digital is totally changing the marketing landscape and marketers are trying to figure out how to effectively use data to get the most out of their efforts,” said Jeb Miller, general partner at Jafco Ventures, in a statement. “The feedback Origami Logic is getting from their early customers shows that they are building something special to address this problem.”
By spending less currently on marketing, that’s allowed Origami Logic, founded by Israelis who had worked in the intelligence service and now headquartered in Menlo Park, to conserve a lot of the $9.3 million that it picked up in November 2012.
“Our Israeli intelligence DNA tells us to go as far as you can before you need to get on the radar screen,” Kahane says. “We didn’t really need funding right now, but the preexisting funds and the new round means that we can focus on execution rather than focusing on what we would have needed to do to close a funding event in the future.”
All the same, he says the company has been assembling a “killer go to market team” — fitting for a company that essentially targets marketers.
The “stealth mode” aspect of Origami Logic means that it’s virtually impossible to get any information from Kahane on how the product looks, what its specific features are, or who are current and target customers. The general aim, he says, is that Origami Logic is working with and looking to pick up “large B2C brands working in complex digital marketing landscapes.” These go across a broad range of verticals, from insurance and finance, to media and video, gaming and e-commerce, and lifestyle and retail.
In all of these, the crux of the problem is the same: there are a lot of places these days where people get their information and provide their own input. In digital alone there is social media, search engines, email, news portals, mobile apps, and more. Each one of these represents a data source and potential platform for marketers. But even if we hear about enormous traffic to, say, YouTube, what’s more difficult is to parse what everything means. While there are a lot of big data analytics firms out there already, many of them focus on solutions that themselves require data scientists to use. Origami Logic provides a way for non-technical people to approach this in a non-technical way, and for a specific end: for marketing projects.
“Marketing has become a significant pull in consumer-facing organisations,” says Kahane. “But it’s becoming unwieldy and extremely difficult to manage data from all the platforms out there, including web, social, mobile, and ad tech. We make that data digestible.”
I asked Kahane about who he sees as competitors, and he says that they are coming from three main areas: enterprises building their own solutions in house; the Salesforces of this world who already have products in place to feed marketing into different platforms like Facebook; and big data companies like Palantir. What Origami Logic offers above all them, quite literally, is a ready-made “control tower” to oversee the big picture now, specifically for a particular vertical, marketing. “While they have basic analytics built in, they don’t do multiplatform as we do,” he says.
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