Insider raises $32 million for its AI-powered digital marketing platform

Insider, an Istanbul-born SaaS startup that had moved its headquarters to Singapore three years ago, has raised $32 million in a Series C round, it announced in a statement to MENAbytes today. The round was led by a US investment firm Redwood Capital and joined by Sequoia India, Dubai-based Wamda, and Endeavor Catalyst.

Sequoia India had led Insider’s $11 million Series B in 2018 and Wamda has been an investor (through Wamda Capital) in it since its Series A. The latest round takes the total capital raised so far by Insider to $47 million.

Founded in 2018, Insider is a multichannel marketing and customer engagement platform that enables digital marketers to drive the growth of their brands. The platform offers the marketers with different tools across offers the entire growth funnel – from acquisition to activation, retention, and revenue. It comes with artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities, helping companies integrate data from different online and offline channels to make predictions about their customer behavior.

The platform allows its clients to personalize campaigns across web, mobile web, mobile app and ad channels.

Insider in a statement said that it is trusted by more than 800 global enterprise brands across retail, travel, media, finance & banking, automotive, and many other industries. Some of the brands that use Insider include Samsung, Carrefour, Dominos, Toyota, Newsweek, IKEA, and CNN. The startup that claims to be profitable has teams on the ground in 24 countries across the world including Middle East.

Insider’s co-founder and CEO Hande Cilingir, commenting on the investment in a LinkedIn post, said, “Starting with 6 desks in a tiny home and with great ambitions, we’ve come so far. We proved that if you have a hunger for success and a team of overachievers, you are unstoppable.”

“The past 8 years have been the most incredible journey of my life. I’ve seen our team grow to 550+ people from 41 different nationalities across 24 countries from Japan to Australia, from the UK to Brazil. Following our aggressive global expansion in APAC, EMEA, and LATAM we are now ready to enter the US market and believe that our fresh solutions to marketers’ biggest pain points will be a major differentiator,” she added.

Apart from the US expansion, Insider will use the latest investment for sales and marketing, hiring more engineers and adding some more features to its platform.