Trinity Ventures is an early stage venture capital firm dedicated to partnering with passionate entrepreneurs to transform revolutionary ideas into reality. With over $1 billion under management, Trinity Ventures believes in personal engagement, mutual respect and goal alignment with the entrepreneurs. Trinity focuses on early stage and seed technology investments with particular emphasis on social commerce and entertainment, digital media, Saas, and cloud and infrastructure.    Trinity Ventures has invested in such leading companies as Aruba Networks, 21Vianet, Blue Nile, LoopNet, Photobucket, SciQuest, Starbucks, BeachMint, Infoblox, Trion Worlds and Zulily.

Trinity Ventures

Block, Inc. (NYSE: SQ) (formerly Square, Inc.) is a technology company with a focus on financial services. Made up of Square, Cash App, TIDAL, and TBD, we build tools to help more people access the economy.

Block, Inc.

AME Cloud Ventures focuses on seed to later stage companies building infrastructure and value chains around data. It specializes in technology-heavy companies gathering or creating unique data at every stage of the data stack — from infrastructure all the way to applications, mobile, and sensors.  It strives to find, fund, and support true entrepreneurs. The firm provides a unique and genuine set of resources to our founding teams, from strong operational and business experience to networks of amazing mentors and international partners, particularly in China. AME Cloud Ventures is the venture fund led by Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo!

AME Cloud Ventures

WiL (World Innovation Lab) is a venture capital firm that partners with leading global corporations and government entities in Japan and Asia. With offices in Palo Alto, California, and Tokyo, the firm’s mission is to serve as a bridge between startups and corporations in the United States and Asia, with a particular focus on Japan. WiL supports its portfolio companies by establishing corporate partnerships that enable U.S. and European startups to scale globally, and Japanese startups to innovate and globalize. WiL invests in emerging technology spanning fintech, insurtech, automation and productivity, cybersecurity, cloud infrastructure, developer tools, health tech and sustainability. Notable WiL investments that have exited to public markets from Fund I and Fund II include Asana, Mercari, Raksul, Wise and Auth0 — whose acquisition by Okta was completed in May 2021. WiL also invests in exceptional venture funds, and supports its LPs in corporate venture investment efforts. WiL also works with its corporate investors on evolving their own innovation capabilities through new business creation, partnerships with leading startups, and organizational culture change. WiL acts as the bridge between startups and corporates across key innovation hubs around the globe in driving growth - starting with Japan and the US.

WiL (World Innovation Lab)

Accel-KKR is a private equity firm specializing in growth and middle-market investments. It also makes mezzanine investments.

Accel-KKR

Birdeye

Birdeye helps businesses grow through happy customers. Over 60,000 businesses use Birdeye every day to attract new leads with listings, reviews, and referrals, convert them into customers with webchat and appointments and delight those customers with surveys, ticketing, and insights - all in one place. Using the Birdeye platform - AI, messaging, automation tools - businesses are delivering great customer experiences to 100M+ people. Founded in 2012, Birdeye is headquartered in Palo Alto, and led by alumni from Google, Amazon, Salesforce, and Yahoo. Birdeye is backed by Salesforce founder Marc Benioff, Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, Trinity Ventures, and World Innovation Lab.

Birdeye offers a suite of tools for increasing a firm’s online visibility. The primary customer experience feature of Birdeye’s platform is its customer reviews tool, which can generate, monitor, and automatically respond to customer reviews and feedback. This can be harnessed on Birdeye’s platform to 1) increase a firm’s visibility by improving its online listings on search engines, 2) conduct review-based marketing through text messaging or webchat, and 3) turn customer reviews into actionable insights.&nbsp;

Using AI to automate, enhance and optimize marketing activities

Marketing Automation

Birdeye Unveils Insights AI and Competitors AI at View 2024

Alphabet

To provide businesses with an advanced method of managing customer feedback.

Startups offering tools for finding and attracting potential customers with targeted ads.

Birdeye offers a suite of tools for increasing a firm’s online visibility. The primary customer experience feature of Birdeye’s platform is its customer reviews tool, which can generate, monitor, and automatically respond to customer reviews and feedback. This can be harnessed on Birdeye’s platform to 1) increase a firm’s visibility by improving its online listings on search engines, 2) conduct review-based marketing through text messaging or webchat, and 3) turn customer reviews into actionable insights.&nbsp;Birdeye is an official Google Partner, specializing in Google reviews, and the firm has solutions for both small businesses looking to improve their online listings and rankings as well as to give visibility to large enterprises’ reviews and reputation across geographies. The platform also allows for 1,000+ software integrations.&nbsp;Birdeye is a multi-award-winning platform and claims to be the most awarded and highest-rated customer experience marketing software. According to the firm, its clients have experienced a 350% increase in the number of reviews received per year as a result of the platform.&nbsp;In October 2021, the firm introduced a referral marketing system that allows its clients to automate referral marketing campaigns as well as run multiple reward strategies and engage with potential customers.&nbsp;Key customers and partnerships&nbsp;As of September 2021, the firm had 60,000+ customers including Harley Davidson Cycles, Nissan, and BMW.

Outbrain is an algorithm-based content recommendation and discovery platform that curates native advertising content from the open web, providing personalized content for brands to increase customer engagement. Outbrain also allows content publishers to amplify its reach by supplying content to the platform. As of September 2023, customers could access 7,000+ online content sources including content by the Washington Post, Guardian, and BBC.&nbsp;Outbrain has been a pioneer in the content recommendation space and was the first to introduce an algorithm-based content recommendation in 2008. It was also the first to introduce a self-service platform for content recommendation in 2012. In May 2021, it tested “QualityRatings,” a tool that implements quality guidelines for the content featured on its platform while using machine learning and AI to create a more personalized user experience. In September 2022, the firm launched <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/13122">Keystone</a>, a business optimization solution for publishers.&nbsp;Outbrain has made a series of acquisitions over the years while making enhancements to its product offerings. In November 2021, <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/6992">Outbrain acquired vi</a>, a contextual video intelligence platform for USD 55 million to grow its CTV and other display ads offerings. In August 2024, Outbrain acquired <a href="https://www.adexchanger.com/online-advertising/outbrain-acquires-teads-from-altice-for-1-billion/">Teads</a>, an SSP and video monetization company, to create an "end-to-end, full-funnel platform" by expanding into TV, video, and CTV advertising.&nbsp; Key customers and partnerships&nbsp;Outbrain’s customers include leading news media outlets such as CNN, MSN, and Sky News, serving more than a billion monthly users (by December 2022).&nbsp;&nbsp;In April 2022, Outbrain’s platform was <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/9907">integrated with ID5</a> to provide a privacy-first customer identification solution.

Outbrain

Marin Software is an adTech firm offering a suite of solutions for brands looking to conduct search, social media, and ecommerce advertising. The firm’s “MarineOne” solution enables Brands to integrate their data under a single platform; coupled with machine learning tools, marketers can optimize ad spending across multiple platforms. In the case of search and social media advertising, Brands can increase their visibility across a number of search engines and social media platforms including Google, Facebook, and Apple Search Ads.&nbsp;In recent years the firm has been making enhancements to transform its Marine One Software as a complete marketing campaign management &amp; intelligence solution. In line with the firm expanded its ecommerce advertising solution capabilities by increasing the number of integrations to include Criteo’s commerce media platform and Instacart’s advertising platform. In <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/12159">2022</a>, the firm rolled out a number of new product and features including 1) MarinOne bidding, the firm's ad bidding marketplace, 2) MarinOne support, to enable advertisers to improve ad performance with multi-edit ad scheduling solutions, 3) social rules engine, to help automate workflows, and 4) <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/15019">Budget Optimizer</a>, an ad budget management solution. More recently, in April 2023, the firm introduced an automation tool <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/17565">“MarinOne Scripts,”</a> which integrates Python scripting with its MarineOne platform, providing marketers with customized and data-driven solutions to optimize campaigns.&nbsp;Key customers and partnershipsAs of October 2021, several brands from varied industries, including Nissan, American Eagle outfitters, and Harmony, use the firm’s solutions.In 2021, the firm made a number of new initiatives in 2021, including an <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/7635">integration with Amazon Ads</a> and a <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/6973">partnership with CitrusAd </a>to expand the ecommerce capabilities of its platform. In January 2023, the company announced an <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/16172">integration with Yahoo</a> to broaden access to programmatic ad content.&nbsp;&nbsp;

Marin Software

Founded in China, Terminus claims to have the first account-based marketing (ABM) platform that unifies the marketing and sales teams’ roles under a single platform. Terminus specializes in B2B marketing and, according to the firm, its “Terminus Data Studio” has one of the largest B2B account databases, which by September 2021, covered more than 70 million businesses. Terminus’s customer data platform (CDP) is fully integrated with its marketing automation platform, through which teams can run multi-channel targeted campaigns across many channels including email, ad networks, live chat, and the web. This can then be analyzed with Terminus’ suite of analytics and attribution tools. By September 2021, Terminus served more than 1,000 customers, including Salesloft, Foundry, and Quantum Workplace.According to a study done by Forrester (in Q2 2020), Terminus has been recognized among the ABM platform leaders.Through a series of acquisitions, Terminus has transformed into a marketing cloud platform offering a range of services. Its two latest acquisitions took place within 12 months. In November 2020, it acquired Growflare, a lead generation and account-based intelligence platform catering to B2B startups, followed by B2B CDP Zylotech in September 2021. Terminus hoped to capitalize on these to build the most comprehensive ABM platform on the market.

Terminus

Founded in France, Brevo <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/18241">(formerly Sendinblue)</a> began as an email marketing automation platform catering to small and medium-scale businesses (SMB). It has since extended its services to become an all-in-one marketing platform; the range of services found on Brevo's platform include email and SMS marketing, customer relationship management (CRM) tools, landing page creation, and Facebook ad management, among others. In November 2022, the firm launched an <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/14388">integrated meetings solution</a> that brings together scheduling, video conferencing, and payment solutions. In March 2023, the company <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/17462">unveiled “Conversations”</a> to manage customer conversations across messaging channels in one centralized location.Brevo’s platform is compared with other well-known competitors such as Mailchimp and Hubspot and is commended for its live support and fair pricing, making it a strong contender in the SMB space.&nbsp;The company has expanded its product offering through a series of acquisitions during 2021-2022. Brevo acquired three firms in September 2021 for USD 47 million: 1) Metrilo, a provider of customer analytics and marketing services for ecommerce stores, 2) Chatra, a live chat messenger app for increasing online sales, and 3) PushOwl, a customer re-engagement website that uses web-based push notifications. In March 2022, the firm <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/9009">acquired MeetFox</a>, a meeting scheduling and video conferencing platform. In September 2022, the company <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/13360">acquired Yodel.io,</a> an Austrian cloud-based phone system provider, to enable additional customer touchpoints, and reduce the overall digital marketing spend for SMBs. More recently, in February 2023, the firm <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/16271?industryIds=62">acquired Captain Wallet,</a> a mobile wallet marketing platform, to broaden its reach internationally. In December 2023, Brevo acquired <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/24833">WonderPush and Octolis,</a> two customer interaction platforms, to expand its CRM capabilities.&nbsp;&nbsp;The firm achieved <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/15834">USD 100 million in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR)</a> at the end of 2022 while maintaining a positive EBITDA position.&nbsp;Key customers and partnerships&nbsp;The platform catered to 500,000+ customers across 180 countries as of end December 2022.

Brevo

Acquia provides a digital experience platform (DXP) to support medium to large enterprises that use Drupal, an open-source content management system (CMS) that provides the back-end infrastructure for websites and by September 2021, powered approximately 2.1% of websites on the internet. The core product offered by Acquia is a marketing cloud that provides a full suite of services to manage the customer journey. The platform features a customer data platform (CDP), unifying data across multiple sources; sales automation tools to deliver personalized marketing campaigns across multiple delivery channels; marketing campaign management tools to manage distributed marketing teams; and a content management platform to organize and monitor content.&nbsp;Having been built on the Drupal framework, which does not require any programming skills to implement, Acquia’s marketing cloud claims to be more accessible and agile than enterprise cloud solutions provided by incumbents such as Adobe and Oracle. In 2021, Gartner’s Magic Quadrant report named Acquia a leader in DXP platforms, while a study done by Forrester (in July 2021) found that customers of Acquia’s DXP solutions experienced a payback on their investment in less than six months, generating an average return on investment (ROI) of 589% over three years.&nbsp;Acquia has made several investments and enhancements to its DXP platform. In January 2021, Acquia, in partnership with Commercetools and Lucidworks, launched “Acquia Digital Commerce,” a service for creating personalized digital shopping experiences for customers. The firm has also added a number of self-serve features to its CDP such as&nbsp;<a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/11422">“right to erasure”</a> to bolster the privacy and security features of its platform to cater to enterprise users. In&nbsp;<a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/35334">October 2024,</a> Acquia added AI capabilities to digital asset management solutions to accelerate campaign delivery.&nbsp;In September 2021, Acquia acquired Widen Enterprises, a digital asset management (DAM) and product information management (PIM) software company, for an undisclosed amount. As a result, customers can have a fully integrated experience on the platform, while the acquisition also added a further 700+ customers. In November 2023, the company acquired Monsido, a website accessibility and optimization solution from CivicPlus, to expand its platform capabilities.&nbsp;In&nbsp;<a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/36365">November 2024,&nbsp;</a>Acquia acquired Monsid to expand Acquia's digital experience platform capabilities.Key customers and partnershipsBy September 2021, Acquia counted one in four Fortune 500 companies, including Johnson &amp; Johnson, Bayer, and Xerox, among its customers.&nbsp;As of September 2024, the company served more than 4,000 customers globally.&nbsp;In June 2022, Acquia&nbsp;<a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/11352">partnered with Workato</a> (enterprise-level workflow automation platform) to integrate with Acquia’s CDP to expand enterprise use of the platform. The integration added 100+ technology integrations compatible with Acquia’s marketing cloud.&nbsp;

Acquia

Firms positioned as an 'all-in-one' marketing platform,  providing a variety of functions across the MarTech stack

Startups providing platforms for planning and managing marketing campaigns.

Startups providing tools to automate the execution of marketing campaigns across varied channels.

Startups providing tools for gathering, cleaning, and enhancing customer data to provide deep analytics. This also includes firms offering account-based marketing (ABM) solutions to drive targeted and personalized campaigns.

Companies that use GenAI as a core part of their product offering for marketing

Personalization tools are mainly used in AdTech and marketing campaign automation

Marketing automation provides measurement and attribution solutions to measure marketing effectiveness

Uses GenAI to automate content creation  and personalize content for marketing campaigns

Uses AI/ML to enable marketing automation, making it a core part of many companies' products

Metaverse advertising is being explored by AdTech segments for in-game advertising

The in-game advertising segment is in development and has a niche relevance to this area

Birdeye

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