Third-party user data that marketing teams rely on has, in recent years, become more expensive and less reliable, particularly as user privacy concerns (and self-interest) have prompted Apple and Google to implement changes to how they track users.
So San Francisco-based SilkChart is trying to help midsize brands tap into their own data — typically referred to as first-party data — to make more efficient decisions with limited marketing budgets.
Founded by CEO Andreea Francis and CTO Matthew Rajcok in 2021, SilkChart provides companies with streamlined marketing analytics, eliminating the need to hire an expensive team of in-house data scientists to collect, manage and interpret that data.
The company's software also helps clients become less reliant on the internet's largest gatekeepers of user data.
"In the absence of having a ton of data scientists, which are expensive to get … you use the next best thing, which up until now has been Google, Facebook, etc.," Francis told me, saying companies now are exploring how to do it interanlly.
Francis, 36, realized there was a need for better insights into first-party data while working on advertising products at Twitter and later as a product manager at Instacart, where she was focused on helping the company hold onto repeat customers.
"My experience both at Twitter and Instacart helped me better understand the challenges related to growth," Francis told me. "At Instacart … we had this huge ‘aha moment’ when we realized, if we can apply product data to our marketing outreach and show people exactly the items they love and reach them when they do their shopping, you end up attracting people who need grocery delivery to feed themselves every week versus people who just want a one-off coupon and never come back."
To provide these types of insights, SilkChart taps into a company's marketing tools and uses application programming interfaces, or APIs, to pull that first-party data and then analyzes it.
The company, which went through Y Combinator's summer batch this year, on Dec. 7 announced raising $5.2 million in a seed funding round. Its investors include Y Combinator, SoftBank, Dentsu, Harlem Capital, Global Founders Capital, Garage Capital, Amino Capital, Asymmetric Capital Partners and several other individuals.
Francis is targeting midsize companies that have enough data to analyze and are focused on growth. She didn't disclose how many customers SilkChart has but told me they've grown revenue by 10 times since entering Y Combinator's program earlier this year.
Their own team is still very small with three employees, but Francis is hoping to double their size.
Over the next year, SilkChart will be adding more automation to its platform to help its customers apply the insights gathered from their data directly onto marketing campaigns.
SilkChart's mission is "helping companies of all sizes go on autopilot. It's crazy that it's almost 2023 and we still rely on humans to churn out analysis slowly," Francis said, and especially during an economic downturn, SilkChart can play a role in "helping companies survive by reducing their marketing spend, which is often a huge cost."
