French adtech startup Databerries, a mobile advertising platform for offline retailers, has announced a $16 million Series A round, led by Index Ventures. Existing investors also took part in the latest round following a Seed round in December 2015, including ISAI and Mosaic Ventures, and angels such as Pascal Gauthier and Greg Coleman.
Databerries was founded in 2014, and enables brick and mortar retailers to use mobile ads to target customers based on previously visited locations. It also determines which ads have successfully resulted in store visits.
"Retailers spend more than $100 billion every year in offline marketing (leaflets, radio, outdoor advertising, etc), without being able to accurately measure its efficiency. However, thanks to mobile devices, there is now a bridge between online and offline," said Benoit Grouchko, CEO of DataBerries, in a statement.
The company refers to its solution as "Real Life Targeting". With the data from Databerries, marketers can see exactly how many people visited a physical retail location after seeing a mobile ad, and they can optimize their campaign in real-time to maximize performance. Marketers can also set up new campaigns to target people that have visited their store already, or people who have visited the store of a competitor.
Since launching in December 2015, Databerries now works with more than 100 physical retailers, including Toys “R” Us and McDonald’s. The company has grown its staff from 4 to 40 in the past year. The company plans to use the new capital to expand internationally, especially in the US market.
"The U.S. is the largest advertising market in the world and we are bringing a solution that has been proven to work, and is unlike anything else available," added François Wyss, COO & co-founder of Databerries.
“‘Half of the money I spend on advertising is wasted, the trouble is I don’t know which half’, goes the famous saying. Yet while most think that this phrase is now obsolete due to advancements in online advertising, it still holds true in the offline world, where retailers rely on a series of assumptions about consumer behaviour," added Dominique Vidal, Partner at Index Ventures, in a statement. "Databerries removes this guesswork by giving offline players powerful tools with which to target mobile users, so they can benefit from a pay-for-performance model that online players have long enjoyed with Criteo."
Read more: Index Ventures (Press release)
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