Samsung, Uniqlo, and hundreds of other big firms use this startup to grab more customers

The Insider founding team / Photo credit: Insider

Singapore-headquartered Insider was born when its founding team realized there was a gap in the digital marketing space. When it came to applications that help online brands gain customers, existing offerings were either too expensive or only covered particular aspects of a company’s needs. For example, they help a website turn more browsing visitors into paying customers, but not attract those visitors in the first place.

Insider’s product, called Growth Management Platform or GMP, covers the gamut of a company’s sales process, from grabbing the customer’s attention to enticing them to come back. More importantly, it uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to do “predictive segmentation.” This means that Insider’s clients can get detailed insights on how to target the right customers with the right messages through the right avenues.

Founded in Istanbul in 2012, the marketing analytics startup crossed over to Asia Pacific by expanding its business in the region in 2015. Last year, it moved its headquarters to Singapore to better take advantage of opportunities in the Asian market.

The startup has managed to nab clients like Singapore Airlines, Uniqlo, Estee Lauder, L’Oreal, and more. To date, it has 300 customers worldwide and just this week raised US$11 million in a series B round led by Sequoia India.

Insider claims a 200 percent yearly growth rate in its revenue. The team declined to disclose specific numbers, but it said its valuation was around US$100 million in the last month.

What brands get out of it

The SaaS product works with a client’s system and customer data, yielding meaningful insights as early as two weeks in. This is because Insider’s enterprise clients usually have high traffic, which generates large amounts of information, co-founder and CEO Hande Cilingir tells Tech in Asia.

GMP works across online platforms, including desktop and mobile web, and mobile apps like online stores and messaging. Cilingir says it saves its clients from the need to set up their own data science and IT teams.

For example, sneakers firm New Balance managed to increase conversion rates by 556 percent through banners advertising holiday discounts. CNN Turkey saw increases in click-through rates on their homepage by using Insider’s tools to show different versions of the site to different audiences and collect data on their behavior.

Huawei and ecommerce startup Orami wanted to lure back customers who left items in their cart and navigated away from their sites – a very common problem in ecommerce. Both firms saw an increase in returning customers who completed purchases after receiving notifications that they had full carts waiting.

Other examples include using geofencing to send notifications about promotions or offers to users’ phones when they are near particular stores.

Therein lies one big downside of Insider’s technology, at least for consumers: getting bombarded with advertising notifications from all sides. Insider hopes that through its personalization and prediction systems, these messages target the right users who will find them useful, rather than spam people.

Insider’s product can start yielding meaningful insights as early as two weeks in.

As it handles a lot of user data for its product to work, Insider emphasizes that it doesn’t share data with third parties. When working with sensitive data for clients like financial institutions, it stores them on its clients’ own servers for extra security.

Early expansion

The road ahead