Following two peak years in funding activity and a global fund crunch notwithstanding, 2016 proved to be another good year for the marketing tech sector with over $1.6B secured in 214 funding rounds, which is almost half the figure in terms of the total funding rounds in 2015 at 429.
Average investment ticket at the seed and Series A stages showed a marginal increase while Series B showed a 20.8% decline, in line with the slowdown in global funding. Consequently, total funding into all the three stages (seed, early and late) showed a decline.
Some of the top investments in this sector were secured by Hangzhou-based GeTui ($108M), New York-based Sprinklr (2008), Beijing-based Talking Data ($100M) and San Francisco-based App Annie ($63M).
Omni-channel marketing, content marketing and social marketing were the top three business models by funding. 500 Startups (Wildfire, Visually), Battery Ventures (Tealium, Vidyard), Sequoia Capital (App Annie, Hubspot), Techstars (ThriveHive, UserMojo) and First Round Capital (Urban Airship, Zenreach) were the top investors in this sector.
The US accounted for 39 of the top 50 global companies in this sector. China, with three in the top 50, was a very distant second, clearly showing the US dominance in this space.
While there were no major IPOs for the sector this year, acquisition activity was marked with three buyouts; San Mateo-based Marketo was acquired by Vista Equity Partners, San Francisco-based Livefyre was acquired by Adobe and New York-based Hipcricket was acquired by Upland Software.
The report covers companies that provide tools for marketers to create, manage and analyse their marketing campaigns across multiple channels ranging from email and social media to mobile. Catch an excerpt of the report, below.