INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Artificial intelligence continues to be the theme of the moment in enterprise software, and today a company out of Asia that has built a
suite of AI-powered marketing and ad tools is announcing a round of funding
Appier, a Taipei-based startup that provides an artificial intelligence engine to brands and retailers to help improve customer engagement,
predict purchasing and improve conversions on their sites, has picked up $80 million.
This Series D includes TGVest Capital, HOPU-Arm
Innovation Fund (SoftBank owns Arm), Temasek Pavilion Capital, Insignia Venture Partners, JAFCO Investment and UMC Capital
The company has raised $162 million to date, with previous investors including Alibaba, Sequoia, SoftBank, and Line
(The company is not disclosing its valuation but says it been growing since its Series C and it an upround
Appier now has around 1,000 customers.
Marketing technology — the bigger area of software that marketing and advertising people use to
help launch, optimize and measure marketing campaigns — sometimes sits under the shadow of adtech, but in reality it estimated to be a
$121 billion business, and growing as marketers for brands, retailers and others turn to data science to improve how they execute their work
and to supplement what has traditionally been a business that operates on human precedents, psychology and hunches.
While the US and UK
account for around half of all that spend, that leaves an interesting opening in markets like Asia Pacific: the customer base is still
nascent but growing, and the number of startups that are focusing on the region are fewer, meaning less competition for business.
Those open
waters became some of the impetus for founding Appier in Asia
Appier CEO, Chih-Han Yu, studied computer science and AI in graduate school at Sanford and then Harvard for his PhD, looking at how to use
human gait data and machine learning to design better orthotics systems.
(If it seems like a big leap — no pun intended — to move from
orthotics to sales conversions, it not an unusual path when you consider that for AI scientists, both are essentially mathematical problems,
jumps that other AI startup founders have also made.) Ultimately, Yu decided to move back home to found his company with Winnie Lee (COO)
and Joe Su (CTO).
In Asia things have been growing so fast that it seemed like an easy entry point to us,& Yu said
The company is already pan-Asian, headquartered in Taiwan, with offices in Japan and Singapore, and with a list of investors that span all
those geographies and more.
Yu noted (in answer to my question about it) that while some of the investors in this round have ties to Hong
Kong, there have been no tensions in respect of the current political situation unfolding between the Mainland and its special
administrative region.
Appier initial and core product is a cross-platform advertising engine, CrossX, which covers retargeting and app
installations, but also provides deep learning to help publishers and brands discover new audiences for their products.
This is still the
company most popular product, but around it, Appier has built a series of other services around the basic concept of better customer
information, specifically sourcing and utilising customer data in more intelligent (and, Yu says, anonimised) ways
This has included making acquisitions — of QGraph and Emotion Intelligence (Emin) to bring in more analytics and functionality into the
platform.
Yu said that the funding will be used to expand further in the region, where it is currently live in 12 countries and works with a
number of large local brands, and the Asian arm of global brands (those customers include the supermarket chain Carrefour, Audi and Estee
Lauder), to improve their marketing work.
&Appier is riding a strong long-term trend for enterprises leveraging data to make smarter
decisions,& said DC Cheng, Chairman of TGVest Capital, in a statement
&Thanks to its unique use of AI technology in the digital marketing space, Appier has been a category leader since its inception and has the
opportunity to expand into new corporate functions where data-based decisions are made
We share Appier ambition and we are excited to be a partner to the company
We are confident that Appier will continue to grow as a sustainable technology company at the forefront of technology innovation.&
