AI startup Appier gets $33M Series C from investors, including SoftBank
Group, Line Corp. and Naver
Appier, a Taiwanese startup that helps companies harness artificial
intelligence to make marketing decisions, announced today that it has raised
a $33 million Series C round from an impressive roster of Asian investors.
They are SoftBank Group Corp., Line Corp., Naver Corp., EDBI (the Singapore
Economic Development Board’s corporate investment arm) and Hong Kong-based
financial services firm AMTD Group.
This brings Appier’s total funding so far to $82 million. Lead investors in
its previous rounds included Sequoia Capital and Pavilion Capital. Appier
co-founder and CEO Chih-Han Yu says its Series C will be used to grow its
engineering and research and development teams in countries outside of
Taiwan, including Singapore.
Appier intends to continue deepening its reach in Asia before it considers
expanding into other regions.
“We are focused on internet companies in Asia and I think this round of
investors gives us great partnerships to expand all over Asia,” says Yu.
SoftBank Group and Line Corp. are both headquartered in Japan, while Naver
Corp. is one of South Korea’s largest internet firms. Both countries are
among Appier’s largest markets in north Asia. (While SoftBank Group’s $93
billion Vision Fund is currently in the spotlight for its unprecedented
investment spree, Appier’s funding came directly from SoftBank Group). EDBI
represents Southeast Asia, another important market, while AMTD is a link to
Hong Kong.
When Appier was founded in 2012, its focus was on cross-screen advertising,
which Yu says served as a launchpad for its other solutions. Now it has two
main products. The first, called the CrossX Programmatic Platform, was
created to let companies apply artificial intelligence to their digital
marketing campaigns. The second, Axion, is a data intelligence platform that
helps companies understand and predict customer behavior. Thanks to its roots
in cross-screen advertising, Appier has a strong graph of user data that
serves as the foundation for its predictions, Yu says.
“Marketing was a starting point for us to first engage with companies and
also find a lot of great partners to work with,” says Yu. “Over the years
we saw the strong need many companies have that want to use AI to solve
multiple problems, analyze and have deeper insight into their users and also
better understand forecasts of user behavior.”
For example, one cosmetics company uses Appier software to synchronize data
from across different departments and sources, including retail sales and its
apps. CrossX helps its marketing team figure out how to increase customer
engagement, while Axion gives them more detailed insight into groups of
customers, including which ones are most likely to turn into repeat customers
and when they will probably want to buy products again.
Appier currently works with three main categories of businesses: consumer
brands, e-commerce companies that already have a lot of user data and want to
add more prediction layers and mobile commerce or game developers that need
to figure out user engagement patterns for online-to-offline services or
in-game behavior.
In a prepared statement, Ren Tanaka, SoftBank Group’s corporate officer and
deputy head of business, said “AI, combined with big data, IoT and other
disruptive technologies, is going to create an impact on the world that will
be bigger than the Industrial Revolution. We are already starting to see AI
generate benefits in many parts of our lives and believe it also has a great
role to play within the enterprise. Appier’s approach to AI for the
enterprise is unique and we look forward to partnering with them as they
build exciting new AI solutions for business.”
Link
https://goo.gl/wRi3yp
total funding $83 M so far 你跟我說這是台灣新創…
所以就算你阿嬤都會造輪子，火箭的價值還是在那邊啦