Modern marketing runs on data. Yet for years, even the most sophisticated teams were stuck piecing together spreadsheets to understand performance, attribution, and ROI. That’s the gap Funnel co-founders Fredrik Skantze and Per Made set out to close.
What began as a pivot from an early Facebook advertising tool has grown into a marketing intelligence platform that now processes 80 billion dollars of digital ad spend, which is around 11% of worldwide marketing budgets.
We spoke with CEO and co-founder Fredrik Skantze about Funnel’s journey from start-up pivot to close to $70m ARR, the cultural principles that drive its team, and what it takes to scale a company towards the billion-dollar mark.
Q&A with Fredrik Skantze
What does Funnel do, and why does it matter?
Marketing runs on data, and at Funnel, we work in the intersection of the two. Funnel is a marketing intelligence platform and the problem we solve for our customers is assembling all their marketing data, making it business-ready, and then helping them use it across the entire workflow: from governance and planning, to measurement, attribution, reporting, and even activation of the data back into advertising platforms.
At its core, the goal is to bring marketing from just data to actual intelligence. If you’re a mid-market or enterprise company operating at scale, today, Funnel is largely the solution you use.
Funnel didn’t start as Funnel. How did the pivot come about?
Back in 2010–2011, we started out as Qwaya, a Facebook advertising tool. It was successful and we had about 2,000 customers and ran $100 million worth of ads through the platform.
But we realised Google and Facebook (and Twitter at the time) would always end up owning ad creation. We felt like there was a great industry being created by Google and Facebook that we wanted to be part of, but it wasn’t in the ad creation space. Competing there was a dead end. When we talked to customers, we discovered the real pain point wasn’t in creating ads, it was in the broader reporting problem making sense of the data. Reporting and cross-platform insights were incredibly manual, and not one that the individual players were set up to solve since they didn’t share data. There needed to be a third party, so that’s when we pivoted and built Funnel.
Growth looks linear from the outside. Has it felt that way from the inside?
Looking back, our revenue growth appears steady and linear. But it never feels that way when you’re living it. It’s full of challenges, setbacks, and hard decisions – like the initial pivot. Today we’re at around $70 million ARR, growing 30% a year. The reason why we’ve gotten here is because of our deep and constant investment in the product and being able to help large companies like Uber, Havas Media Group, Publicis, and so on operating at scale with tens of thousands of data sources. Our long-term goal is $1 billion ARR, which means sustaining that growth rate year after year.
What role does retention play in your growth?
Retention is everything. To grow sustainably, you can’t just rely on new customers. You need to expand with existing ones. At least a third, if not half, of your growth should come from your existing customer base. That’s what makes it possible to keep growing 30% year on year. If you do that as a SaaS business, you can sustainably grow 30% year on year on year and become a really large company. And we’re on this path.
How have partnerships helped you and Funnel on the growth journey?
They are very important, especially if you can identify and retain the right ones. For instance, Mikael Johnsson, one of the founders of Oxx, has been with us through the entire journey. From our first product, through the pivot, and into scaling Funnel. That pivot was one of the hardest decisions we’ve ever made. We’d raised money for one product and had to make the call to change direction. Mikael helped us work through that process and with our existing investors to keep funding the business through the transition.
What I value from a partnership is the balance between ambition and empathy for the entrepreneur, and a pragmatic view that every company needs to be built in its own way. I’ve been able to rely on my partners’ deep SaaS expertise and an understanding of the go-to-market playbook and the metrics that matter, and that kind of experience is incredibly valuable. Unless you have a partner like that, you end up having to learn it all by yourself.
How would you describe Funnel’s culture?
At its core, our culture is about teamwork, collaboration, and learning and development. That’s what we believe keeps a company cohesive as it grows.
We really care about our people and focus a lot on development. We split this into two areas: one is helping individuals grow, making learning and growth part of our core values. The other is leadership development, something I’ve always felt is incredibly important in tech companies, but not nearly focused on enough.
We’ve built a strong leadership development programme. Every leader or future leader at Funnel goes through it, so they can become world-class managers and help their teams grow. We actually measure not only our employee net promoter score, but also our manager net promoter score. This score is consistently high, which is something I’m personally really proud of. Overall, our strong focus on people and culture is recognised not only by the team but also by the broader community, and in 2025 we made it onto Newsweek’s list of 100 most loved workplaces globally.
What are you most proud of so far?
I would call out three things. First, that we’re solving a real customer problem. This is not a nice-to-have, it’s a huge pain point that we’ve addressed, and some of the most iconic brands in the world are using Funnel.
Second, that we’ve built a company at scale. The company building process has been hugely rewarding and we’re proud to be able to provide a place to work for so many people.
Which brings us to the third thing, the people. We now have team members celebrating 10-year anniversaries here. Some of them came to Funnel in their first job, and now they’re leaders. To be able to follow that journey is very exciting.
Key lessons & learnings from Funnel’s journey
- Solve the real problem: pivoting early helped Funnel find product-market fit in a space competitors couldn’t solve.
- Invest deeply in product: sustained product investment keeps you relevant in a fast-changing industry.
- Retention drives compounding growth: at least a third to half of SaaS growth should come from existing customers.
- Culture compounds too: leadership development and strong management practices scale alongside product.
- Choose the right partners for you: founders need investors who combine ambition with empathy, pragmatism, and SaaS expertise.
