Today, I’m thrilled to announce that Marpipe has closed an $8 million Series A funding round.
The raise was led by Stage 2 Capital with participation from ValueStream Ventures, Commerce Ventures, Ripple Ventures, and Samsung. Further, we’ve seen Laconia Capital Group, Math Capital, and TIA Ventures deepen their existing investments into the future of data-driven creative. To date, we’ve already received some phenomenal coverage about the round from our friends at Business Insider and AdExchanger.
We’ve noticed that there’s two main perspectives when it comes to ad creative. The first perspective is the traditional one - the one that wants to continue to do things the way they’ve always been done, because that’s just how it is. These creatives believe that the existing workflow, which is rooted in arbitrary tastemaking, shouldn’t be changed. The second perspective is the innovative one - these are the rebels who are willing to surrender some creative control in order to find competitive efficiency and performance advantages. These rebels don’t really care about the opinion of the highest paid person in the room - they care more about what will perform best, they care more about their customers opinion than their own opinion.
We are arming these rebels with the ultimate tool to carry out this transformation against the old guard.
I’d like to offer a few quick thoughts on this and then get back to work.
First - the creative workflow is changing permanently and we find ourselves at the tip of that spear. Here's an observation that informs everything that we’re building: the creatives of tomorrow will look a lot more like engineers and scientists than like traditional artists. With this new reality, brands have to adapt or die. At Marpipe, we're offering an easy way to adapt.
Second - for brands, creative testing is like exercise. It's painful, annoying and resource-intensive to do. But we all know that those who do it the most are the strongest and healthiest.
When it comes to creative testing, Marpipe is like introducing a forklift into a warehouse for the first time. It's an absolutely unfair efficiency advantage, and you no longer need to break your back doing things by hand. All you need to focus on is training the 'manual box-carriers' to become 'machinery operators' and you will out-test your competition every time. Some prefer to continue to carry boxes by hand because that's all they know. We don't try to convince those people of the obvious.
Third - building something new and category-creating is 100% all about the people. Without them, I'm just some kid who's in way over his head. Actually, I definitely still am that... But you can't spark a revolution without leaders and generals that will jump into the trenches with you.
To that end, I'd like to thank the folks who put in blood, sweat and tears with me from the beginning, and those who picked up a shovel to join us along the way: Pierce Porterfield, Samuel Russo, David Miele, Jeremy Bloom, James Goldman. Your support has been unwavering. Thank you.
Speaking of people, we need more! Our hiring philosophy is simple - hire smart people and get out of their way. If you know any folks who can help us arm the rebels, please send them to our careers page.
Since the Mad Men era, the process behind making and launching ad creative has remained stubbornly unchanged. The process of guessing and checking, or simply deferring to the opinion of the highest paid person in the room, no longer works in today's competitive digital environment.
Marpipe changes the creative workflow from the very beginning by letting brands take their designs and ideas, create and test all the potential creative possibilities within days, and have their audiences determine which creative executions to build out and scale. This new workflow means marketers can reliably achieve better-performing ad creative, while creatives see how to produce and deliver ads they know will work better.
