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Latana, an AI-Powered brand tracking and consumer insights platform, has raised a €36M Euro Series B equity and debt financing to scale its SaaS offering, which provides companies with consumer data and key insights to help track brand and campaign performance.
An international market leader in brand tracking services, Latana also uses its technology to understand the underlying forces behind the opinions of people worldwide with special initiatives including the Democracy Perception Index, which is the largest annual study on the global perception of democracies.
Since its launch in 2019, as a response to a pressing need for companies to better understand their audiences and brand perception, Latana has been leading the way in the world of brand tracking. Today, Latana is pleased to announce that it has raised a €36m Series B investment round led by Oxx, with participation from Balderton Capital and Kreos.
"With digital now dominating marketing spending, performance marketing and other data driven tools and techniques have empowered marketeers to make faster and better decisions. However, companies still spend typically 40-60% of their marketing budget on brand marketing which is still largely driven by gut feel and best efforts. Powered by novel sampling methods and advanced statistical processing techniques Latana is disrupting this paradigm by providing brand marketers with accurate, timely and affordable brand marketing data. This provides for an enormous market opportunity and we're convinced that Nico and the Latana team are in pole position to build a really large company." Says Oxx General Partner and Latana board member Mikael Johnsson.
Latana CEO, Nico Jaspers, says that the company is on a mission to answer the 'ultimate question' for brands: how does our target audience perceive our brand?
"Great marketers thrive on quantitative tools, whether this is for social media management or ad-spend. For too long, brand marketers have been left behind, and have made decisions on 'get feeling', rather than data", says Jaspers. "Without data, there's no way to know if campaigns are effective. Brand marketers are left with little idea if they are driving results, or impacting business outcomes. More importantly, companies have no real idea how target audiences perceive their brand. In a hyper competitive market, brand is more important than ever and companies still often spend over half their budgets on brand marketing. But only very few can measure the impact of this spend, and when they do, it’s very expensive and the data is often questionable. More often than not, brands face the tough choice of either not measuring their brand at all, or engaging an agency that charges a six to seven digit price tag for a regular tracking setup across a few markets. We set out to change this and enable brands of any size to measure and track how their target groups perceive them."
"This is our mission. Latana provides a direct channel to consumers that helps brands understand exactly what its key audiences are thinking. With its advanced survey technology, and intuitive data-driven dashboard, Latana provides brand marketers with numbers, and a clear view of campaign success and audience perception. We are striving to achieve the gold standard brand marketing: to enable our clients to accurately measure the ROI of their marketing spend. Despite enormous budgets, brand marketers are one of the few people who are still lacking adequate tools to measure the impact of their work. We’re here to change that and enable brand marketers at any company to get visibility on their work. In order to do that, we’re currently building the world’s largest database on brand performance.”
Latana’s technology was born from Jasper’s previous company, Dalia Research. Along with co-founder Fernando Guillén, Jaspers noticed a shift in human behaviour: more people were easily reachable via their smartphones. They realised that this everyday action for billions of people worldwide could open up consumer insights opportunities that go far beyond traditional methods in terms of range and efficiency. Latana has developed a proprietary platform through which it bids on mobile ad-space to distribute micro-surveys to a daily audience of over 2 billion users. This enables it to cover any market across the world and even drill down to city level. To analyse the data, Latana has developed an ML-based bayesian analytics framework that is able to take fragments of survey data and use it to inform a model. Latana can thereby leverage the billions of answers that it has collected around brand to inform companies about key insights into their target audiences.
Today, to ensure wide demographic and geographic coverage, Latana uses mobile optimised surveys to access both a precise and an “opted -in” audience for authentic and representative brand opinions in 100+ countries and 1000s of cities worldwide. Over the past years, Latana has grown rapidly, increasing revenues by 7x and now servicing clients globally. Latana counts among its clients as some of the most forward thinking brands in gaming, e-commerce, mobility, wellness apps, e-learning, and more. It helps them understand their target audiences, and evaluate what makes people buy from them rather their competitors.
Latana also recently sold part of its original API technology (through Dalia Research) to market research firm PureSpectrum, and is now focusing on scaling its B2B SaaS brand tracking platform. This takes Latana from focusing on both platform API clients and consumer businesses to a solid direction in the B2B SaaS arena servicing consumer companies.
On the heels of this recent funding round, the company has big ambitions for rapid growth. It will scale its marketing and sales operations, grow its consumer-facing product teams, and expand its product offering through R&D. Lantana will also make key Product and Operational leadership hires, in order to further development of its SaaS offering. The company services clients globally, and these growth plans will enable Latana to expand both its product offering, and its core client base from SMBs to larger organisations, which have been traditionally serviced by larger market research firms.
“We’re excited to have strong partners on board to scale our software and client base,” said Jaspers. “This investment now enables us to fully focus on developing the next generation of brand analytics and consumer insights.”
About Latana
Latana is a brand tracking platform that allows users worldwide to understand key brand insights for both themselves and their competitors and enables them to understand their brand awareness as well as zoom in on the audiences and purchase drivers that will enable their growth.
For more information, visit latana.com or find Latana on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
