- The marketing startup SilkChart seeks to help businesses better understand their advertising data.
- It was in Y Combinator's spring 2022 class and says it was able to grow revenue during the program.
- Now, SilkChart has raised $5.2 million in funding to scale its data-analytics business.
Andreea Francis stumbled upon the idea for her startup, SilkChart, while working as the head of product growth for the food-delivery giant Instacart. She realized that by combining Instacart's marketing data with its data around which products were performing best, she could prevent the company from spending a ton of cash on general ads where it was tough to tell whether those who saw them would become loyal customers.
By combining the data, she was able to serve personalized ads that could target people who would come back week after week, based on which products were selling well and were likely to be interesting to them.
She credits her tool with a 30% jump in quarter-on-quarter revenue for Instacart and says that's when the lightbulb went off. "I realized that this was actually something that had potential for a lot of other companies," she told Insider.
Francis teamed up with Matthew Rajcok, who had founded the Y Combinator-backed data startup Mystro, to found SilkChart and create a service for companies to target their advertisements based on similar types of data from product sales.
Unlike traditional ways companies analyze the data from their online ads, which requires data engineers to comb through advertising data points like ad click-throughs, product sales, which channels the ad performed best on, and time and day of purchases to produce reports, SilkChart automates this analysis and gives marketing teams direct recommendations on which ads are bringing in customers who will pay for their products or services and keep coming back.
In a world in which advertising platforms run by Apple and Google are planning to share less information about consumers over time, companies will increasingly turn to their own data about customer behavior to drive growth, Francis predicted.
SilkChart had raised a small pre-seed round before YC, but the startup got a massive influx of investor interest post-Demo Day, Francis said, and has now raised $5.2 million to date. Investors include Y Combinator, SoftBank, the ad agency Dentsu, Harlem Capital, Global Founders Capital, and several angel investors.
Francis and her cofounder, Rajcok, the chief technology officer, applied to YC's spring 2022 cohort, and the experience of attending the incubator really helped them hone their core pitches to investors and customers during the down market, Francis said, particularly around how their product could save startups money on hiring.
"Because we can make this argument that we provide an option that not only reduces costs, but also helps marketers grow revenue, we align with this profit focus that is so important in this current investor climate," Francis said. SilkChart was able to grow its revenue by 10x over the course of the accelerator, which made it much more attractive to investors as well.
Check out the 12-slide pitch deck that the founders of SilkChart used to raise $5.2 million in funding:
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