Marketing tech remains hot: $3B in Q1 deals, including 85 investments and 35 acquisitions

Marketing tech is still hot. White hot, in fact.

At VB Insight, we’re tracking a list of 2,100 companies, 2,400 executives and investors, and a continually growing total of 3,200 funding events, including $45.2 billion raised last year, all thanks to VB Profiles. And the category just keeps getting bigger.

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In fact, there have been nearly $3 billion in deals just this past quarter.

That’s a lot of zeros, and it’s mostly new funding. VCs continue to pour gasoline on the marketing tech landscape, and through our analysis, we’re able to shine some light on where they’re gravitating towards and why that matters.

Why does it matter?

Because marketing tech is eating up more and more enterprise budgets, and it’s not even close to slowing down. And because marketing tech is the only enterprise technology category yet to see a single $10 billion exit. Key word being “yet.”

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VB’s Q1 2015 Marketing Tech Funding Landscape
is available now for $99, or free with your martech subscription

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Currently, most marketing groups employ a sort of Frankenstein’s monster of different toolsets to interact with customer data — and despite the promise of the marketing cloud, the big software players simply can’t keep pace with the speed of new types of evolving customer data.

So companies keep popping up left and right, with some serious funding horsepower to fill those gaps. Over half of the 120 companies included in this study were on the receiving end of at least $10 million raised. Most of the growth stage rounds ranged from $20 million to $80 million, with significant outliers such as advertising giant WPP’s $243 million equity stake in comScore.

Here’s a quick look at some of the data that shows the types of companies in the study with their respective totals:

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Analytics is the hottest category by a long shot. In this case, it spans audience insights, predictive analytics, app analytics, conversion rate optimization tools, big data behavioral software analysis companies, and a handful of other categories. If you remove Pinterest’s $367 million round and Etsy’s IPO (which aren’t explicitly “marketing tech,” but notable enough events to include), the graph is an even more staggering symbol of the power of the customer.

Again, it’s all about the customer (data).

There’s more of it than ever before at every end of everyone’s funnels — and brands, marketers, and advertisers all stand to benefit from being able to better capture, parse, understand, and act on it. This is the opportunity in marketing technology. And the rise of mature, DIY marketing solutions aimed at SMBs and mid-market companies only accelerates both supply and demand in this category.

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Note: With the rise of beacon technology, we should expect the mobile-specific category to accelerate in future quarters. Same goes for database technology and middleware, which will face the task of integrating the universe of data being collected and analyzed.

Check out the full report here for a more detailed analysis of each of the 120 companies included in the study.