Black Swan Data has closed its Series B funding, raising a total of GBP6.2 million. The round sees Albion Ventures join initial institutional investors Blackstone and Mitsui, to help further accelerate Black Swan’s international growth and expansion of its product platform, ‘The Nest’.
Founded in 2011 by Steve King (CEO) and Hugo Amos (CSO), Black Swan has achieved outstanding growth based on its unique capability of applying big data and predictive data science techniques to consumer marketing.
It works with many of the world's leading consumer-focused brands including PepsiCo, Vodafone, Samsung, Disney and Panasonic, to help them think differently about data, technology, their customers and ultimately their own businesses. The company’s growth rate of 134 per cent CAGR earned it first place in the Sunday Times Start Up Track 2015 and the company topped the 2016 Sunday Times Export Track 100, being the UK’s SME with the fastest growing international sales.
The additional funding will enable Black Swan to further accelerate the development of its proprietary software platform, ‘The Nest’, which provides deep customer insights by linking publicly available data to a customer’s private data, and complete the build out of its senior management team.
It has recently made significant progress in this area with the appointment of Jeff Headley as US managing director, previously SVP personalisation at Dunnhumby, and Simon Davies as product director, previously VP product management at DataSift.
The growth of Black Swan comes at a time when consumer interaction with technology continues to increase and evolve giving consumer brands the opportunity to gain a competitive edge by interpreting consumer data to make business changes. According to Gartner, 90 per cent of all data was created in the last two years, 70 per cent of organisations purchase external data and the market for ‘Advanced Analytical Service Providers’ is already worth USD16 billion. By 2018, over half of large organisations will compete using advanced analytics and proprietary algorithms.
King says: “Black Swan’s seen some phenomenal growth over the last 18 months and this has been reflected in the conversations we’ve been having with investors and clients alike. At the start of the year, it was very straightforward to raise the amount we wanted from Blackstone and Mitsui, but there was an opportunity to add to the round with Albion Ventures to accelerate our plans further.
“We’re at the forefront of this industry opportunity and we’re working with some of the world’s biggest brands to help them not only make sense of the data around them, but use to gain a competitive advantage and better engage with their audiences. It’s fantastic to have Albion Ventures join our corner, helping us to attract amazing talent like Jeff and Simon, develop and scale our technology quicker and move rapidly to capitalise on the market.”
Ed Lascelles, partner at Albion Ventures, says: “We are thrilled to partner Steve and Hugo through our investment in Black Swan. This is an exciting company, with an outstanding team and high profile customers in a high growth market. Businesses that leverage data intelligently will lead the way and Black Swan has the potential to become the leading provider of automated, predictive analytics to the digital marketing sector.”
Headquartered in London, Black Swan services its international client base through offices in Bristol, Exeter, Hungary, Los Angeles, New York, Singapore, South Africa and Toronto and currently has over 240 full time employees.
