Polaris-backed Simon Data Raises $54 Million Series D Led by Macquarie Capital

Jason Davis

Simon Data, which has built an advanced customer data platform to drive marketing, has raised $54 million in a Series D round led by Australia’s Macquarie Capital with participation from all major existing investors, including Boston area firms Polaris Partners, .406, and F-Prime. It was the eight-year-old New York startup’s first funding round since 2019, and took the total amount it has raised so far to $115.8 million.

“We’re seeing a fundamental shift in the CDP space – pitting packaged solutions that exist independently of enterprise cloud data warehouses against composable solutions that are purpose-built to unlock its potential,” said Simon Data co-founder and CEO Jason Davis, a data scientist and three-time entrepreneur.

Data Scientists at Helm

“Simon’s unique architecture enables our customers with a marketer friendly-UI typical of packaged CDPs, while at the same time offering the composability benefits of reverse ETL [extract, transform, load] tools,” added Davis, whose previous venture, Adtuitive, was acquired by e-commerce firm Etsy in 2009.

Davis, who holds a Ph.D. in machine learning, joined hands with Matt Walker, an Apple data scientist he hired at Adtuitive, to co-found Simon Data. The two set out to build an advanced customer data platform with faster, more precise segmentation and personalization. Walker serves as the startup’s chief technology officer.

Users of the firm’s first CDP — built on Snowflake’s data cloud — include TripAdvisor, Equinox, JetBlue, ASOS and Venmo. Besides offering data and its processing at a central location, Simon Data says its platform requires little coding, and is designed to turn marketers into data scientists.

Simon Data calls its CDP a “connected” one, to differentiate itself in the market. With a Connected CDP, marketers access customer data directly within the cloud data warehouse (like Snowflake), build complex customer segments and easily activate them in end channels, the company says. This occurs as the resulting data is transmitted back on a continuous loop between marketing channels and the data warehouse.

“We call this the ‘Connected CDP’ because enterprises enjoy the benefits of using a CDW [cloud data warehouse] for their data infrastructure, while deploying a workflow and UI custom-built for marketing teams,” Simon Data says.

Resounding Feedback
Vimeo’s 300% increase in free-trial conversions over the last several years is a “testament” to Simon Data’s ability to individualize and elevate our customer communications, said Scott Grove, the video platform’s vice president for marketing. “Solutions like Connected Segmentation empower the marketing team to quickly build segments and deliver personalized messages that consistently resonate,” he added.

The Series D funding round came close on the heels of Simon Data’s launch of Connected Segmentation, a tool that lets marketers build and manage customer segments directly within Snowflake. This funding is expected to “supercharge our product development with other cloud data warehouse providers and enable us to offer a fully-connected CDP deployment to all major enterprises – regardless of cloud data infrastructure,” Simon Data said.