Yes, we are funded.
I am excited today to announce that LiftLab closed a seed round led by Cowboy Ventures with participation from Array Ventures, MathCapital, and an amazing group of angel investors.
For Bala, Mike, and I, the decision to raise capital for LiftLab was an easy one. While we had successfully bootstrapped our last firm, Datasong, the opportunity for LiftLab is clearly much bigger. Market leaders are missing the information needed to optimize media plans with confidence. Our vision, to make media experimentation easy, puts marketing organizations in direct control of creating the intelligence needed to make great decisions. Ensuring that marketers can test more quickly and with greater success called for a number of innovations across the testing processes. Growing customer demand meant hiring experts to help our customers get started with experimentation. While we knew how to bootstrap this, the market was asking us to go faster. Plus, it was clear LiftLab would benefit from the advice, network, and capital to help us grow. Time to raise some money and grow our team!
When I met Ted Wang of Cowboy Ventures in December 2018, he immediately got our vision and liked that we were getting the band back together to tackle an even bigger opportunity. Cowboy Ventures is a top seed stage firm with direct experience in next gen retail and the ad-tech ecosystem. We are excited to have Ted join Bala, Mike, and me on LiftLab’s Board of Directors.
Array Ventures and MathCapital join Cowboy Ventures in our seed round. Shruti Gandhi of Array Ventures has built a high performing portfolio of enterprise AI/ML companies and immediately clicked with our vision. We are excited to have Array Ventures be part of this journey. We hold MediaMath in high regard for their work in programmatic advertising. Joe Zawadzki and his executive team have built an impressive business and continue to invest in the industry through MathCapital.
We are also excited to add a dozen individual investors to the LiftLab team including:
Pat Connolly – former CMO at Williams-Sonoma, BoD member at Canadian Tire and Total Wine
Tom Chavez – founding CEO of both Krux (Salesforce) and Rapt (IBM)
Chris Scoggins – ex DataLogix and an investor / BoD member of several high-profile tech firms
Dominique Hanssens, PhD – Marketing optimization luminary, UCLA, BoD member at MarketShare
Michael Levit – Co-founder and CEO at Apptitude; Co-founder of Spigot and prior Alibaba (Vendio), AOL and BlueLight.com
The funding process was an excellent checkpoint on both our business strategy and product roadmap. We met a ton of great people and grew both our pipeline and our thinking along the way. In the end, funding benefits our customers by letting us build faster and service even more effectively.