Dún Laoghaire, where Profitero is headquartered. Image: © Bob/Stock.adobe.com
With the fresh funding, Profitero’s new executive team plans to take the company to the ‘next level’ by developing new products and further growing the business.
This week, Dún Laoghaire-headquartered e-commerce analytics business Profitero announced that it has raised $20m in its latest funding round, which was led by Scaleworks with participation from Conviction Capital.
The company was founded in 2010 by Vol Pigrukh, Dmitry Vysotski and Kanstantsin Chernysh. Profitero’s technology is used to help brands measure their market share growth and benchmark performance against competitors.
It enables companies to integrate online sales, share metrics and digital shelf analytics so that they can pinpoint the factors that lead to increased sales. The company monitors more than 450m products across 8,000 retailer websites and mobile apps daily, including Amazon, Argos, Tesco, Zalando and eBay.
Changes to senior management
Profitero, which counts Adidas, L’Oreal and General Mills among its 4,000 clients, has also added two ad industry veterans to its management team.
Pigrukh will be stepping down from the role of CEO to be replaced Bryan Wiener, while Sarah Hofstetter has been named president of the company. For the role of CTO, Profitero has hired former LogMeIn chief technology officer Sandor Palfy.
Wiener is a board member at Cars.com and former CEO of Comscore and 360i. Hofstetter, who is a board member at Campbell Soups, previously worked as president of Comscore and Kayak Communications. She was also CEO and chair of New York ad agency 360i. When the duo led 360i, they sold the business to Dentsu Inc in 2010 for $275m.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Wiener and Hofstetter both left their positions at media measurement firm Comscore within a year of starting due to “disagreements with the board over the direction of the company”.
The funding
The company plans to use its fresh funding to develop new products and grow its business. Profitero previously raised $8m from Polaris and Silicon Valley Bank, as well as $1m from Delta Partners and Enterprise Ireland in its early years.
Hofstetter said that she and Wiener were “hooked” when they came across Profitero while working together with a private equity firm. When the firm didn’t invest, the duo approached the company to see if they could work together in another capacity.
She added that Pigrukh and his team did an “amazing” job with the company so far, bringing it 4,000 client brands in 50 countries. “We want to take it to the next level, with features and innovations that align with where e-commerce is going,” she said.
Wiener and Hofstetter told the Wall Street Journal that Profitero now plans to launch new services, such as ad campaign management tools for Amazon. The new management team members said that the business, which has 250 employees across offices in Dublin, the US, Europe and China, is not profitable.
The future of e-commerce
“Brand readiness isn’t where it needs to be,” Hofstetter added. “A recent Kantar study found only 11pc of brands surveyed said they had integrated their e-commerce strategy and activation throughout the company.
“Marketers are, unfortunately, underprepared with consumer adoption of e-commerce. The pandemic accelerated it. We’ve made our careers helping brands navigate chaos and change.”
Lew Moorman, co-founder and general partner at Scaleworks, said: “E-commerce was already on a major growth trajectory but Covid-19 has sent it into hyperdrive by forcing consumers to adopt online ordering behaviours at a much faster rate.
“These major shifts in digital purchase behaviour have created a large opportunity for Profitero as one of the few platforms capable of helping brands optimise their digital businesses across thousands of retailer sites and at a global scale.”
