Triple Whale Inc. has raised $25 million from investors including Shopify, as merchants on the e-commerce platform are quickly signing up as the startup's customers.
The Columbus startup doubled the number of paying clients to 5,000 brands – and grew revenue by 15-fold – in just its second year of operation, according to a news release.
Returning VC investors led the Series B: Elephant, a Boston firm founded by Warby Parker veteran Andrew Hunt, and NFX, which has offices in San Francisco and Israel. Shopify joined in a "strategic participation," the release said.
"Triple Whale has built an excellent marketing analytics platform that equips multi-channel merchants with the marketing insights they need in a fast-evolving online retail landscape," Sabrina Frias, Shopify corporate development manager, said in the release.
Triple Whale, which has raised a cumulative $52.7 million to date, will use the latest round to reach larger clients and invest in more AI and automation for its software.
The company has tripled to 130 employees since last spring and expects about 100 hires this year, in contrast to tech companies cutting jobs. About one-fourth of the staff are in Central Ohio, with the rest remote or at satellites in Austin and Raleigh, North Carolina, and Jerusalem, Israel.
The platform unites disparate sources of data and creates real-time dashboards so online retailers can better track marketing spending and its effectiveness, such as whether Facebook or TikTok are generating more returns. It has a new feature that gathers data even under the new iPhone operating system that lets users block tracking.
The co-founders are CEO AJ Orbach, COO Maxx Blank and CTO Ivan Chernykh. They met when Blank, a Columbus native, was working in tech in Jerusalem; Blank and Orbach moved to Columbus a few years ago.
“When AJ and I built our first two e-commerce stores, we had zero visibility into which channels were helping drive revenue and which were a total waste of money,” Blank said in the release.
“We initially built Triple Whale to help us sell more, but immediately realized that we could help thousands of other entrepreneurs in our same position.”
