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Health care marketing startup Appature sold to IMS in blockbuster deal

GeekWire’s in-depth startup coverage tells the stories of the Pacific Northwest entrepreneurial scene.

Appature’s new offices along Westlake Avenue boast stunning views of Lake Union and a playful atmosphere, including Nerf guns everywhere, bean bag chairs and a well-stocked Kegerator.

None of those things will be going away. But something else will: the name on the lease.

Appature — a six-year-old Seattle startup whose cloud-based software is used by healthcare companies to track and enhance marketing campaigns — has agreed to be sold to health data giant IMS Health.

We’re hearing that the deal’s value topped $100 million, a significant valuation for the 60-person startup. Co-founder Kabir Shahani declined to comment on the terms of the deal, though he said it was a “great outcome for investors and employees.”

“We go from being a small startup in Seattle trying to make an impression in the market, which we have been to our credit — and all of a sudden we become this global company in 100 countries, with vast resources to bring our vision to life even faster,” said Shahani. “Our five-year vision for things will happen over the next two or three.”

The acquisition comes eight months after Appature reeled in $6.1 million in venture funding from Madrona Venture Group and Ignition Partners, marking a nice return for both Seattle-based venture capital firms. Total funding in Appature, which was bootstrapped and profitable for its first three years, stood at $9.6 million.

Ignition’s Richard Fade, a board member at Appature, called it a positive deal for investors.

“On the whole we would have liked to have been able to develop the company for another couple years prior to M&A but the IMS offer was compelling,” said Fade, adding that the company is an example of the type of cloud computing talent developing in Seattle.

Madrona’s Tim Porter also celebrated the outcome, and pointed to the strong entrepreneurial drive of founders Chris Hahn and Shahani.

“They were growing quickly and had a bright future as a stand­alone company, but when IMS approached the company it was clearly a singular opportunity to scale even more efficiently and we are happy that IMS is also excited about the future of this Seattle technology company,” Porter said.

Shahani called IMS Health the “gold standard in health care,” noting it was the original big data company since it was founded in the 1950s.

“These guys process more data than the IRS,” said Shahani, who turned 30 last October. If all goes as planned, Shahani said that IMS has the opportunity to create a powerful new Web-based service that combines data and software. “To be really interesting, and really valuable, you have to be a data company and a software company,” he said.

IMS will bring the data, while Appature plans to bring its software expertise.

IMS Health will immediately inject more horsepower into Appature, helping the company grow its client base and international presence. As part of that, Shahani said that they will immediately open new jobs for about 20 staffers, with plans to grow the team to as many as 100 people this year. Appature will continue to operate as a standalone business under the umbrella of IMS.

“Through this acquisition, we’ll drive the development of next-generation, data-driven marketing effectiveness solutions, transforming the way clients plan and execute their programs. Appature also brings a strong culture of innovation to IMS, reinforcing our commitment to agility and the development of breakthrough solutions,” said IMS U.S. president Seyed Mortazavi in a statement.

IMS was purchased by the private equity firm TPG, CPP and others in 2009 for $5.2 billion.

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Amperity reveals marketing data platform and Microsoft partnership as it aims to become Seattle’s next great startup

Amperity reveals marketing data platform and Microsoft partnership as it aims to become Seattle’s next great startup

GeekWire’s in-depth startup coverage tells the stories of the Pacific Northwest entrepreneurial scene.

Amperity co-founders Kabir Shahani and Derek Slager. Photo via Amperity.

Amperity has top talent, solid venture investment, and a tested solution to a pressing problem. Now the company is coming out of stealth mode to share its vision with the world as it aims to become one of Seattle’s top new startups.

Kabir Shahani and Derek Slager are back at it again, four years after selling Seattle-based healthcare marketing startup Appature to IMS Health in 2013.

A year-and-a-half ago, the entrepreneurs teamed up for another go in the marketing automation space, only this time with a much bigger vision for a product tackling a much more difficult problem.

The result is Amperity, which today lifted the hood on its technology that helps some of the world’s largest companies better understand their individual customers by connecting disparate data sources from across the internet.

The 40-person startup raised $9 million in February 2016 from Madrona Venture Group — which participated in the initial venture round for Appature in 2009 — along with a who’s-who list of angel and venture investors like Liquid 2 Ventures founder Joe Montana; Founders’ Co-op partner Chris DeVore; former Microsoft corporate vice president S. Somasegar; Concur co-founder Rajeev Singh; former drugstore.com CEO Dawn LePore; Isilon Systems founder Sujal Patel; and former ExactTarget chief marketing officer Tim Kopp, who now is a partner at Hyde Park Ventures.

Amperity used that cash to build out its team and create a marketing technology platform which ties together unorganized data about individual customer habits and helps clients fine tune their targeted marketing campaigns.

Based on their experience at Appature, which helped healthcare companies track and enhance marketing campaigns, Shahani and Slager knew that there was an opportunity across various industries to better leverage data to create a more complete view of a customer. They worked with Dan Suciu, a computer science professor at the University of Washington and a data management expert, to help figure out how to connect customer data across different sources without a unique identifier.

“We spent a bunch of time with Dan last year to really understand if this was technically feasible — how to handle this scale of data and how to apply machine learning to this problem,” Shahani told GeekWire this week.

Amperity had early pilot customers test its technology earlier this year and saw “extraordinary results,” Shahani said, with revenue increasing and customer acquisition costs dropping. The startup has continued to build out its technology that ingests trillions of data points from a single customer and crunches that information with machine learning to give marketers a holistic understanding of a given user.

Amperity links together several discrete data sources related to one customer — everything from an in-store transaction, online purchasing tendencies, browsing behavior, mobile app activity, email campaign responses, CRM information, etc.

Shahani noted that part of Amperity’s secret sauce is making it easy for companies to plug that data into its system. The CEO said this process has historically been human-driven and “incredibly error prone.”

“We have the scale to not only ingest that data very quickly, but actually do something really meaningful and useful with it so you can action on it to drive the kind of results we’re seeing with our customers,” he added.

The platform can help a retailer figure out customers who spent more than $1,000 last year, but only $250 so far in 2017, for example. Or, it can help an airline identify customers who flew four times in 2016, but only once this year.

“This arbitrary question you might want to ask of your customer data — this is stuff that these companies can’t do today,” Shahani said. “It’s impossible for them to quickly get that data.”

Amperity is not a predictive analysis platform; instead, its clients can take this data and then figure out how to tweak their marketing campaigns. Its technology is particularly valuable for companies that are not “internet-first.”

Amperity’s customers, which include Fortune 500 companies, range from a wide variety of industries — one of many differences from Shahani and Slager’s experience at Appature.

“We have a very big vision around what we see this business capable of being in terms of its contribution to the market and our customers, and to our employees and this community,” Shahani said. “That’s something that really drives us in a way that I don’t think we were driven by before and thought about before.”

Shahani and Slager have long-time ties to the Seattle area and are bullish about creating the next great local startup. Shahani said today marks a milestone in reaching that goal.

“If we continue to play our cards right, continue to serve our customers well, and continue to build great product, we will have the same opportunity that many of those lighthouse companies like Tableau, Apptio, and others have done,” he noted.Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaks at Microsoft Envision.

Being in the Seattle region also helped Amperity link up with Microsoft for a “really meaningful partnership,” said Shahani, who has spent the past year working directly with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Microsoft customers will get access to Amperity via its independent software vendor system while the company will look to integrate the platform with its Adobe partnership.

“The way Amperity lights up products like Azure, Azure Data Lake, Azure Machine Learning, the Power BI stack, Dynamics — when you feed those products with better, unified data about the customer that is more complete, those products perform a lot better for the user,” Shahani explained. “Satya was very persuasive in getting us to build Azure compatibility, which is something we hadn’t done historically with our product.”

Shahani noted that Amperity is not exclusive to Azure and expects the same level of integration with Amazon Web Services in the future.

Amperity has steadily added veteran talent to its leadership team, from bringing on Dave Fetterman as vice president of engineering, to hiring Amy Pelly as its CFO, to adding Aashish Dhamdhere as vice president of marketing.

But Amperity has also seen a bit of churn with some hires. Shahani acknowledged a “sub-15 percent attrition” but said the company considers that within a normal range.

“One thing we’ve always been committed to as an operator is that if things aren’t working, you try to make it work where it makes sense, but if it doesn’t, you make the call early,” he said. “It’s not always us saying it’s not a fit, or the other party saying it’s not a fit. Sometimes you both look each other in the eye and say, ‘you know what, we thought this was a great idea, but for both of us it turns out it’s not working out.’ We’ve worked extra hard to make sure we have those conversations candidly and we do them quickly when we realize there isn’t a great fit and we treat people the way we want to be treated on the way out.”

Shahani said the company is still working off its initial $9 million investment — “we’ve been very capital efficient,” he noted — but expects to entertain additional funding conversations down the road.

Amperity is celebrating its launch with an event in Seattle today featuring executives from Crate & Barrel, Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy, Alaska Airlines, Nordstrom, and Starbucks.

“Every brand wants to have a more personal relationship with their customers, but they often have data in disparate locations and systems,” Matt McIlwain, managing director at Madrona Venture Group and Amperity board member,’ said in a statement. “Amperity combines modern machine learning and cloud technology to create compelling customer data management solutions that help the world’s leading brands serve those customers better.”

[kabirshahni]

Appature Co-Founder and CEO Kabir Shahani Selected as One of PharmaVOICE's "100 Most Inspiring People in Life-Sciences Industry

SEATTLE, WA--(Marketwire - Aug 1, 2012) - Appature Inc. (www.appature.com), the leading provider of cloud-based relationship marketing software for life sciences, announced today that Co-founder and CEO Kabir Shahani has been honored as one of the 100 most 'inspiring people' in the life-sciences industry. 

Each year, PharmaVOICE recognizes 100 professionals, chosen from a broad cross-section of biopharma companies and service providers, who have significant influence and make a large impact on the life sciences industry through their actions.

Chosen by thousands of PharmaVOICE readers for being inspiring, motivating, and demonstrating outstanding leadership, this honor reflects Shahani's commitment to thinking big, driving innovation and leading with passion and integrity.

PharmaVOICE noted, "Shahani has played an instrumental role in Appature's growth and the adoption of its product, Appature Nexus, a relationship marketing technology platform that provides companies the tools to focus on their target customers, make more informed business decisions, and drive overall revenue while saving money on marketing campaign execution. Appature Nexus is revolutionizing the way pharmaceutical companies reach healthcare providers and patients, allowing marketers to reach a broader HCP audience and improve patient adherence, monitoring, and communication."

"Kabir Shahani's dedication, leadership, and vision have helped Appature grow from a $4,000 start-up to a multimillion dollar life sciences technology company in a matter of a couple years," said Taren Grom, Editor of PharmaVOICE. "These achievements, as well as Mr. Shahani's demonstrated passion for creating strategic partnerships, have earned this CEO and co-founder a place on the 2012 PharmaVOICE 100."

During his time at Appature, Shahani has also been recognized as one of Business Week's Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs, named a 2011 Puget Sound Business Journal 40 Under 40 honoree and was recently nominated for Washington's Young Entrepreneur of the Year award by the Small Business Association of America. As a devoted community leader and mentor, Kabir has also demonstrated an ongoing commitment to Washington STEM, a new organization dedicated to increasing student readiness in kindergarten through 12th grade in the subjects of science, technology, engineering, and math.

To read the complete July/August PharmaVOICE 2012 profile of Kabir Shahani, please visit http://goo.gl/vEc3Y.

Tweet this: Appature CEO Kabir Shahani receives @PharmaVOICE award for #leadership, #innovation in #healthcare marketing http://goo.gl/vEc3Y.

About PharmaVOICE PharmaVOICE is expressly written and designed to deliver the views, opinions, and insights of executives who are shaping the direction of the dynamic life-sciences industry. PharmaVOICE reaches more than 29,000 BPA qualified subscribers and more than 100,000 users with its digital edition, which contains original exclusive bonus content.

About Appature, Inc. Appature, Inc. is a Seattle-based technology company that provides a "surprisingly simple" cloud-based relationship marketing software platform, Appature Nexus, designed exclusively for healthcare and life science companies. Appature Nexus enables marketers to deepen brand relationships and drive share growth with a platform that integrates the marketing database, campaign management tool and analytics suite into one easy-to-use tool. Leaders in the pharmaceutical, medical device and consumer healthcare industries rely on Appature to realize the full potential of their customer relationships.

 Please visit www.appature.com.

[kabirshahni]

Amperity raises $100M to unify customer data

Amperity, a Seattle, Washington-based customer data platform, today announced it has raised $100 million in series D funding, valuing the company at more than $1 billion post-money. Founder and CEO Kabir Shahani said the company will use these funds, which bring its total raised to $187 million, to expand sales and marketing, grow internationally, and invest in R&D.

The pressures of the pandemic made knowing consumers a matter of survival for many businesses. Faced with the challenge of optimizing performance without third-party data, brands recognized the necessity of having an identity graph as part of an effort to sustain customer relationships. These graphs, which are at the foundation of customer data platforms, allow enterprises to make sense of trillions of data points from customers across in-store visits, web traffic, mobile usage, loyalty programs, and other touchpoints.

How human-centered design drives data-driven experiences In today’s competitive market

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Amperity was founded in 2016 by Shahani and Derek Slager, who aimed to free engineers from integration duties while giving businesses access to the data they need to build loyalty. Prior to founding Amperity, Kabir and Derek worked together to launch enterprise marketing management startup Appature, where Kabir was CEO and Derek was VP of engineering. Appature was purchased in 2013 by IT medical services provider IMS Health, which has since merged with Quintiles.

“Amperity has created the first-party data graph and customer toolset for many of the world’s most loved consumer brands. There’s a vast universe of solutions that might provide an element of what we do, but no one can deliver a more complete customer [view] with an agnostic approach we provide at both ends — data in, data out,” Shahani told VentureBeat via email.

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Behind the scenes

Customer data platforms are collections of software that create persistent, unified customer databases accessible to other systems. Data is pulled from multiple sources, cleaned, and combined to create a single customer profile. This structured data is then made available to other marketing systems.

The customer data platform market is anticipated to be worth $10.3 billion by 2025, according to Markets and Markets, up from $2.4 billion in 2020. Amperity’s competitors include homegrown solutions, as well as legacy on-premises systems from Acxiom and Epsilon Independent and cloud-based services like ActionIQ and Redpoint Global.

But Shahani claims Amperity is the only customer data platform with an “AI-driven customer 360.” Each of its products is built on what the company calls the DataGrid, a fully connected customer infrastructure that processes terabytes of data each day. DataGrid streams billions of rows of data at under 100 milliseconds per API call, enabling Amperity’s AI models to provide deterministic and probabilistic individual and household identity throughout customer segments.

Amperity works with customers across retail, travel, hospitality, and financial services, including Patagonia, Alaska Airlines, Starbucks, The Home Depot, Lucky Brand, and Crocs. Recently, Amperity teamed up with a lifestyle retail client to better understand the company’s customers. In 18 weeks, Amperity says it built a dashboard with transaction, marketing, store, product, and privacy data, correcting lifecycle status for 25% of the client’s customers with interaction and revenue attribution. This led to $7.7 million in campaign revenue from predictive segmentation and churn prevention campaigns.

[kabirshahni]

Ciara joins board of Seattle startup Amperity to help guide corporate social responsibility efforts

Amperity is adding some more star power to its board of directors.

The Seattle-based customer data platform announced Thursday that Grammy-winning singer Ciara will head up corporate social responsibility efforts, serving as an advocate and advisor on Amperity’s community initiatives.

Ciara, the wife of Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson, is involved in a diverse array of entrepreneurial and business engagements in the Seattle area and beyond.

She recently launched the fashion company House of LR&C alongside Wilson and former Lululemon CEO Christine Day; she’s the founder of the record label Beauty Marks Entertainment; she’s a board member for Why Not You Foundation, a philanthropic organization dedicated to supporting underprivileged youth in Seattle and the surrounding area; she’s an ambassador and partner with leading brands such as Revlon, Equinox, and Pandora. She challenges us to think differently about our role in helping brands develop consumer trust, and how our technology can make a positive impact in people’s lives.

Ciara was also involved in Wilson’s efforts to get a Seattle-based social-media-style app called TraceMe off the ground two years ago and the couple are members of the Seattle Sounders FC ownership group. On Wednesday the pair announced that they are founding partners and equity owners in Evolution Advisors, a venture from insurance broker Acrisure catering to minority-owned businesses.

Amperity’s platform ingests trillions of data points from a single customer — via emails, purchase history, mobile app usage, website traffic, physical store visits, etc. — and crunches that information with machine learning to give marketers a holistic understanding of a given user.

CEO Kabir Shahani said Ciara gets the business and Amperity is getting an entrepreneur with firsthand experience building and representing brands at multiple levels,

The appointment is in line with a bit of trend around companies recruiting athletes and entertainers into the board room. The Wall Street Journal pointed out Thursday that Ciara shares the distinction with tennis star Serena Williams, Oprah Winfrey, and onetime basketball star Shaquille O’Neal. One expert in the report cautioned companies not to recruit just a famous name but someone with relevant experience building a business.

Founded in 2016, Amperity has attracted brands such as Alaska Airlines, Patagonia, Kroger, and others that use the company’s software to fine-tune their targeted marketing campaigns by connecting disparate data sources about individual customer habits.

Starbucks was an early adopter of Amperity’s technology, and the coffee giant’s President and CEO Kevin Johnson joined the board last fall.

Shahani said Ciara fits right in with Johnson and the other business leaders who serve on the board, including Concur co-founder and Accolade CEO Raj Singh and Madrona Venture Group Managing Director Matt McIlwain.

“People want to be able to trust the brands they buy from, and brands earn that trust when they truly know who their customers are and how to make them feel seen,” Ciara said in a news release. “Amperity helps brands understand their customers so they can personalize interactions and build that trust. That’s why I’m so excited to be part of what they’re doing, because I want to help everyone have better experiences with the brands they love.”

Amperity has 160 employees and has raised $87 million to date.

[kabirshahni]

Appature Co-Founder and CEO Kabir Shahani Selected as One of PharmaVOICE's "100 Most Inspiring People in Life-Sciences Industry

SEATTLE, WA--(Marketwire - Aug 1, 2012) - Appature Inc. (www.appature.com), the leading provider of cloud-based relationship marketing software for life sciences, announced today that Co-founder and CEO Kabir Shahani has been honored as one of the 100 most 'inspiring people' in the life-sciences industry. 

Each year, PharmaVOICE recognizes 100 professionals, chosen from a broad cross-section of biopharma companies and service providers, who have significant influence and make a large impact on the life sciences industry through their actions.

Chosen by thousands of PharmaVOICE readers for being inspiring, motivating, and demonstrating outstanding leadership, this honor reflects Shahani's commitment to thinking big, driving innovation and leading with passion and integrity.

PharmaVOICE noted, "Shahani has played an instrumental role in Appature's growth and the adoption of its product, Appature Nexus, a relationship marketing technology platform that provides companies the tools to focus on their target customers, make more informed business decisions, and drive overall revenue while saving money on marketing campaign execution. Appature Nexus is revolutionizing the way pharmaceutical companies reach healthcare providers and patients, allowing marketers to reach a broader HCP audience and improve patient adherence, monitoring, and communication."

"Kabir Shahani's dedication, leadership, and vision have helped Appature grow from a $4,000 start-up to a multimillion dollar life sciences technology company in a matter of a couple years," said Taren Grom, Editor of PharmaVOICE. "These achievements, as well as Mr. Shahani's demonstrated passion for creating strategic partnerships, have earned this CEO and co-founder a place on the 2012 PharmaVOICE 100."

During his time at Appature, Shahani has also been recognized as one of Business Week's Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs, named a 2011 Puget Sound Business Journal 40 Under 40 honoree and was recently nominated for Washington's Young Entrepreneur of the Year award by the Small Business Association of America. As a devoted community leader and mentor, Kabir has also demonstrated an ongoing commitment to Washington STEM, a new organization dedicated to increasing student readiness in kindergarten through 12th grade in the subjects of science, technology, engineering, and math.

To read the complete July/August PharmaVOICE 2012 profile of Kabir Shahani, please visit http://goo.gl/vEc3Y.

Tweet this: Appature CEO Kabir Shahani receives @PharmaVOICE award for #leadership, #innovation in #healthcare marketing http://goo.gl/vEc3Y.

About PharmaVOICE PharmaVOICE is expressly written and designed to deliver the views, opinions, and insights of executives who are shaping the direction of the dynamic life-sciences industry. PharmaVOICE reaches more than 29,000 BPA qualified subscribers and more than 100,000 users with its digital edition, which contains original exclusive bonus content.

About Appature, Inc. Appature, Inc. is a Seattle-based technology company that provides a "surprisingly simple" cloud-based relationship marketing software platform, Appature Nexus, designed exclusively for healthcare and life science companies. Appature Nexus enables marketers to deepen brand relationships and drive share growth with a platform that integrates the marketing database, campaign management tool and analytics suite into one easy-to-use tool. Leaders in the pharmaceutical, medical device and consumer healthcare industries rely on Appature to realize the full potential of their customer relationships. Please visit www.appature.com.