Appier, a Taipei-based startup that provides an Artificial Intelligence (AI) engine to various brands and retailers to improve customer engagement, predicts purchasing and improving the conversion for the websites. The business recently received Series D funding worth $80 million; it includes investments from TGVest Capital, HOPU-Arm Innovation Fund, Pavilion Capital, JAFCO Investment, UMC Capital, and Insignia Venture Partners. The company has raised approximately $162 million to date from various investors, including Line, SoftBank, Sequoia, and Alibaba.
Marketing technology has seen an exponential rise in development and investment over the past 3 years, with a focus on online marketing and providing customized products for each user. Martech helps the businesses to launch, optimize, and measure marketing campaigns, and it’s all set to reach $121 billion. In order to grow, businesses are turning toward data science to improve the execution of various marketing campaigns and supplement what was traditionally based on operations of psychology and hunches.
Currently, the US and the UK account half of that spend, which leaves an interesting opening for martech players, located in the Asia Pacific region. The customer base in the Asia Pacific is still at the nascent stage, but over the next decade, businesses would see more deployments.
Appier is not the only tool in the market that is helping the marketers to do their jobs better. Some of the major players in the martech domain include Datorama and Bloomreach. Datorama, a cloud-based AI-powering marketing analytics platform, was recently acquired by Salesforce for $800 million. Bloomreach is another business using big data to capture more relevant customers for a brand, which was last valued at about $530 million in 2016. IBM’s Watson has embarked on AI for business by improving the marketing campaigns for its products. In 2020, AI is expected to bring more customization in offerings and e-commerce search channels.
