Marketing software company closes on Series B funding
INDIANAPOLIS (Inside INdiana Business) — An Indianapolis-based digital marketing agency and software provider has closed on a $4.5 million Series B round of funding. Driven Data says it will use the funding to further grow its platform and add to its team, which has already quadrupled in size over the last 18 months.
Driven Data says its marketing platform integrates first-party data from multiple sources for automotive dealers. The company says dealers have previously had to rely on third-party data to target consumers and track revenue, but privacy concerns and lessening support for third-party cookies has made the process difficult.
“In 2017, I imagined this day would come, where users were not going to accept being tracked through a trail of cookies all over the internet, and advertisers were going to be behind the 8 ball, not having an innovative solution that could talk to multiple data sources and scale and adapt to changing environments,” Jon Berna, chief executive officer of Driven Data, said in a news release. “Our team has been building a platform to solve this exact issue and go well beyond what current marketing software solutions can do.”
The funding round was led by entrepreneur Rick Gibbs and JHCapital LLC. Gibbs is the co-founder of Dealer.com, which was acquired in 2013 for $1 billion, is also the chairman of Driven Data.
“To say Driven Data’s platform is ‘impressive’ would be a huge understatement – it is visionary in the truest sense,” said Gibbs. “As Google, Apple and Facebook re-write the rules around how advertisers handle privacy, targeting and measurement, companies are getting shut out of access to third-party data, leaving them spinning in circles sorting out how to integrate and leverage first party data from multiple sources. Luckily, Jon has done the work already so dealers can pivot and dramatically improve their marketing performance.”
Driven Data has also announced the hiring of Liz Kelley as vice president of sales and media, and the promotion of Zach Hendrix to chief customer officer. Hendrix previously service as vice president of strategy for the company.
Driven Data’s workforce has grown from 12 to 50 since the beginning of 2020. The company says it is currently hiring for sales, customer service, software development and marketing positions.