October 5, 2017
Ashu Garg
Years ago, I met a bright young entrepreneur, who really impressed me. It was obvious that he had the intelligence, drive, and vision to build an amazing company. But when he presented his idea for a martech platform to me, I wasn’t sold on the specific idea. “Try something else,” I urged him.
But this entrepreneur—Chaitanya Chandrasekar—didn’t give up. He kept working. And even though he ignored my first bit of advice, he also kept coming back to me for more. That was the beginning of a four-year long relationship. Many consultations and meetings later, I concluded that my instinct about this person was 100% right—but my initial assessment of his idea wasn’t. Chaitanya proved me wrong.
That’s why today, we’re very excited to announce that Foundation Capital is leading the QuanticMind’s Series B. Four years ago, Chaitanya’s core insight was that aggregating data across the customer journey coupled with AI can dramatically improve media buying. Over time, the company has substantially expanded the data sets that it aggregates and is also beginning to influence varied facets of the customer journey.
The company is an instantiation of my Decade of the CMO thesis—that data would impact every facet of martech, by allowing companies to engage the consumer at all parts of their journey and nurture long-term relationships. QuanticMind fits in well with Foundation’s portfolio of successful martech companies that were also built around this key insight, including Responsys, TubeMogul, and Freewheel.
Our investment in QuanticMind is also part of a larger thesis: that the lines between marketing, customer service, and sales are increasingly blurry, and that, at leading-edge companies all aspects of the customer experience are converging. As these functions converge, the distinction between adtech, martech, salestech, and customer-success tech is also increasingly blurry. In this paradigm, companies need to build a unified consumer profile that combines both PII and cookie data across touch points, and over time.
QuanticMind works with sophisticated digital marketers to help them build a unified view of their customer data, and then applies AI to optimize key elements of the customer journey including search, shopping channels, and social. The company already works with some of the most advanced performance marketers in the world, and will have close to 100 customers using their platform by the end of the year.
QuanticMind is a perfect cocktail of the things we love: a long-standing relationship with an exceptional founder, a sticky product that delivers tangible business, and an underlying data layer/technology stack that has enduring value. I’m proud to officially welcome them to Foundation Capital family.
Congratulations, QuanticMind!