Aqfer Inc. was chosen as one of Orlando Business Journal's 2022 Fire Awards honorees, who were featured in OBJ's April 29-May 5, 2022, weekly edition.
The Windermere-based startup — which has offices in New York; Palo Alto, California; and Chennai, India — delivers an efficient way for companies to collect, manage, analyze and distribute marketing data. Its next-generation marketing data platform provides a future-ready, privacy-compliant, scalable framework for brands and their partners to create data-centric marketing architectures.
Here's more from founder and CEO Daniel Jaye:
What was your company’s biggest accomplishment of 2021? Getting our Series A funding, which has position us for scaling and strengthening our go-to-market teams in sales, marketing and engineering.
How did you get it done? With a serial entrepreneur as a founder, Aqfer is no stranger to the VC process. However, we knew we needed to find the right partner to really power us to the next level. Our criteria was finding an investor who could provide "smart money" — meaning not only the financing required to help us scale, but also the guidance with proven frameworks that can help our team scale while minimizing false-steps in our delivery and go-to-market strategy. While running lean and accumulating wins, we finally found the right team with Resolve Growth Partners. Upon completing our due diligence, we successfully closed an $11 million Series A in November 2021.
How does your company stay innovative and on the cutting-edge? Our mission is to help enterprises adopt data-centric marketing by creating an environment for powerful and agile marketing applications that don’t have to reproduce solutions to common yet challenging marketing problems.
What strategies have you implemented to recruit and/or retain talent in a competitive labor market? We are a remote-first organization and seek to hire talent around key hubs including Orlando (which houses our corporate headquarters), New York City, Boston, Chicago and Denver. This approach enables us to promote a hybrid work environment for in-person work, where appropriate, while also opening up to talent from across the country. We also offer an unlimited vacation policy for employees to maximize work/life balance and a generous benefits package. Finally, we foster a culture of camaraderie with weekly “no-shop-talk” socials.
What is the biggest challenge facing your industry? The digital advertising ecosystem faces a combined challenge of increasing yet vaguely understood privacy regulations along with browser-based changes, such as Google’s deprecation of third-party cookies in Chrome, also known as the "Cookiepocolypse." These challenges combined with ballooning data storage and cloud computing costs are forcing companies to rethink their digital marketing strategies. Fortunately, Aqfer’s data-centric marketing architecture provides a scalable, repeatable and privacy-compliant framework for companies to create their own first-party data platform that is future-ready for these challenges and more.
What is your company’s top goal for 2022? Build the foundation for scale. In 2021, we brought in seasoned industry experts to build out our product, client success, engineering, marketing and partnerships teams. These leaders are enabling us to deliver excellence across our organization as we seek to build upon our eight-times growth over the last three years.
In the past year, what progress have you seen in the growth of Central Florida’s entrepreneurial and tech ecosystems? We’re encouraged by recent announcements we’ve seen in funding, contracts and acquisitions. Specifically, we’re highly encouraged by developments in UCF’s incubator with companies like Red 6’s U.S. Air Force contracts, Beep’s $20 million Series A announcement, and BCA Technologies’ acquisition by Revalize. A rising tide lifts all boats, and these positive developments will help fuel the region’s tech ecosystem in the coming years.
What is the local technology and innovation sector’s biggest obstacle to more growth? For Orlando to continue to excel, we’ll need more VC success stories. New York City, Boston and Silicon Valley still dominate, however, we are seeing positive trends for Florida in general and Orlando specifically. With the pandemic normalizing Zoom meetings, that has helped investors be more willing to consider startups outside of their own backyards. This is positive for Orlando. However, getting to the next level will require a few more local unicorn breakouts like we’ve seen from Stax.
Are you hiring now? Yes, we would like to add another 15 positions in 2022 throughout our sales, marketing, client success and engineering teams. We anticipate another 15 new employees in 2023 as well.
Aqfer Inc.
- Top executive: Daniel Jaye, founder/CEO
- Year founded: 2018
- 2021 revenue: $4.7 million
- 2021 YOY revenue growth: 123%
- Capital raised since founding: $11 million
- Employees in Central Florida: Nine
- Employees companywide: 46
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