Everyone universally agrees that data is the new gold. Virtually every single company we come across wants to become more data-driven, as they recognise that data is key to unlocking more customer value and becoming more efficient and effective. This is especially true for marketers, who are dealing with large amounts of data and increasing complexity of the marketing stack. We have spent a long time at Felix trying to understand technologies that are being created to help marketers handle this complexity, and today we are so pleased to announce that we have led a €11 million series B round of funding in Adverity, Vienna-based marketing data intelligence platform. We are also extremely excited to be joined on this journey by existing investors in Adverity, Mangrove, Speedinvest, 42 Capital and AWS Grunderfonds, and new investors, SAP.io and Sapphire Ventures.

Adverity displays so many characteristics of what we love at Felix!

Mission-driven founders with big ideas and global ambitions

At Felix we are extremely founder-driven, aiming to back mission-led founders with big ideas and global ambitions. Adverity was founded by exactly these kinds of founders. When Alex, Martin and Andreas founded Adverity in 2015, they recognised companies’ increasing desire to be data driven, while being confronted with an ever-growing number of channels through which to collect customer data. They experienced many of these pain points themselves, and they set out to create a technology that would help companies tackle this data complexity and revolutionise data-driven marketing.

Laser focus on product as key to winning customers

As tech investors we know that product is everything, and having a strong focus on product excellence is what differentiates winning companies. Adverity’s laser focus on product was palpable when we had our first product demo and we continued building greater conviction on product especially after talking to many enthusiastic customers!

Adverity has developed two main products, DataTap, which automates the integration of data, and Insight, which also harmonises and integrates data, presenting it via easy-to-interpret dashboards and interfaces. Much of the hard work of data analysis that marketing professionals previously struggled to master is now automated and easy. Marketers can see data from different platforms alongside each other in a glance. Brands benefit from greater flexibility, aided in no small part by a general shift to faster, more efficient cloud systems. Put simply, Adverity is making data analysis more nimble, reliable, responsive and productive.

Building a global business from Austria

We’ve been so impressed by the team’s execution, doing a lot with little. The business has grown from its home base in Austria, opening an office in the UK in 2018 and winning global customers, including in the US, where they plan to open an office in the near future. Adverity now boasts dozens of customers across the world, including IKEA, Runtastic, Essity, Reprise Media, OMD, Mindshare and Omnicom. The company has grown rapidly and more than doubled revenues in 2018, adding loyal customers at a rapid pace. This growth has been achieved extremely capital efficiently, with “magic numbers” that are truly magical!

Operating in a market with strong growth trends

The market Adverity operates in is set to continue growing quickly. More marketers are relying on marketing technology, with CMOs now devoting 29% of their budget to martech, according to the latest Gartner CMO Spend Survey, up from 22% the year before. This creates a tremendous opportunity for Adverity to help more customers to manage data complexity and truly understand their marketing investment. No wonder that two of the most important themes for us at Felix are “power of data” and “tech-enablement of CMO” — we are very passionate about these two themes!

Since many of the companies in Felix Capital’s portfolio are consumer-facing, relying on data to understand and serve their customers, the synergy with Adverity was clear to us from the beginning. We are also huge believers in technology’s ability to help companies build better consumer propositions in general, and this has been the thesis behind many of our B2B investments such as Olapic, Mirakl, Yoobic and Unmade. We are also excited to back an Austrian business, our first investment in the country, and look forward to supporting the team’s continued success in the years to come!

Sasha and the Felix team