4C Insights, Inc. (“4C”), a global leader in data science and media technology and High Tech Campus Eindhoven resident, today announces the completion of $26 million in Series C financing. The investment was led by Kayne Partners, the growth private equity group of Kayne Anderson Capital Advisors, L.P., with participation of all previous investors, including Jump Capital and Prime Ventures (via its shareholding in Civolution). Prior to its Series C funding, 4C had raised $11.6 million over the past three years.
(Source: High Tech Campus Blog)
4C plans to use the funds to deepen its market presence through geographic and product expansion. Specifically, the company will increase applications of affinity-based targeting across TV, video and social media using its unique data science and multi-screen software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering. To sustain the current and expected pace of innovation and near-triple-digit year-over-year growth, 4C also plans to add technical talent and sales resources.
“Brands need data science and media technology to capitalize on multi-screen convergence,” said Lance Neuhauser, CEO of 4C. “We have a proven infrastructure to ingest and model data along with a robust SaaS platform to activate it across channels and screens. We expect strong growth through global expansion as we put our solutions in the hands of more brands, agencies and media owners.”
87 percent of consumers use personal electronic devices while watching TV according to Accenture’s study, “Digital Video and the Connected Consumer”. To capture attention, marketers require better ways to reach people with targeted messages. Accordingly, demand continues to rise for data-driven marketing technology. According to PriceWaterhouseCoopers’ Global Entertainment and Media Outlook, total worldwide entertainment and media revenues will rise from $1.74 trillion in 2014 to $2.23 trillion in 2019.
4C’s integrated platform for multi-screen analytics and activation harnesses the opportunity provided by synchronous media consumption. By utilizing its proprietary data science to help brands reach their most valuable audiences, 4C’s marketing technology delivers coordinated messaging across screens in an automated execution. 4C also provides real-time metrics for measurement that capture the full media value and enable better, faster decision-making.
The funding is the latest in a series of significant moves from 4C. Recently the company announced it had hired Anupam Gupta as Chief Product Officer and Kevin Kearns as Chief Revenue Officer. In June, 4C announced that it has been named a Snapchat partner, which will give brands the ability to leverage 4C technology to access the 100+ million daily active users on the Snapchat platform. 4C also recently unveiled 4C University, providing training in its product suite and delivering institutional knowledge across TV and social media. In May, 4C announced a series of partnerships including Turner to target TV audiences utilizing social data, 20th Television to quantify the effectiveness of brand integrations, Groupe M6 to monitor broadcast assets, and Wide Orbit to activate social data through programmatic TV.