London, UK, 26th April 2018 – Amplience, the global leader in cloud delivered Rich Media, Content Management and Asset Management Software-as-a-Service, has secured $37 million Series C funding led by Octopus Ventures, with participation from Columbia Lake Partners.
The funds will be used to accelerate growth by expanding sales and marketing channels in EMEA, the Americas and APAC, and to further invest in the enhancement and adoption of the Amplience Retail Engagement Platform.
The fundraising follows the successful launch of ‘Dynamic Content’, Amplience’s powerful headless and ‘API first’ content production, management and delivery solution. ‘Dynamic Content’ is the first Content Management System (CMS) designed to integrate with retail systems like eCommerce to solve the mobile shopper engagement challenge. Its ‘content first’ architecture enables marketing and merchandising teams to create the high volume of rich content required to power millions of personalised customer journeys. It does so by reducing content production cycles from weeks to hours through implementing lean and agile production methods into the core tools and workflows.
Dynamic Content forms a key component of the Retail Engagement Platform, along with Dynamic Media – which simplifies the management and delivery of image and video media, and the Content Hub – for digital asset management. The platform is completed by two additional modules – Product Configuration, which supports advanced visual product customisation, and User Generated Content which enhances customer journeys with powerful visual social proof in the form of customer produced, shoppable product images.
James Brooke, Founder and CEO of Amplience, commented “We would like to thank our customers, partners and investors for the confidence they have placed in us. 2017 was an amazing year in terms of growth and innovation. No other software vendor is able to provide the range of content production, management and delivery capabilities, from the cloud, that branded manufactures and retailers need in order to compete in a mobile-first world.”
Jo Oliver, Investment Director at Octopus Ventures, remarked that “all Retail businesses are waking up to a new era, one in which the customer is in control. Success demands new content strategies that deepen shopper engagement using richly contextual storytelling and merchandising.” Oliver went on-to-say that “The Amplience team is absolutely focused on the future of content and asset management – and we’re delighted to once again lead the investment round and support their ambitious plans to become the leading platform for brand and retail engagement.”
Craig Netterfield, Managing Partner at Columbia Lake Partners added: “CLP initially invested in Amplience in 2015 because of their excellent products and strong leadership team. Amplience has continued to innovate and win. We are pleased to support their growth with additional capital from our new fund, dedicated to supporting high growth European technology companies.”
Amplience was founded in London in 2008 and has been dedicated to helping branded manufacturers and retailers deliver rich shopping experiences that drive shopper engagement and sales. In 2017, Amplience delivered over 20 significant new cloud-platform features, with no customer down time or upgrade cost. Traffic on the platform scaled significantly, and in November 2017 (Black-Friday-peak), Amplience delivered 171 billion content objects, which at peak was 154,000 requests per a second – supporting over 2 million shopper journeys per hour.