Launchmetrics Bags $50M Financing

Launchmetrics, the leading marketing platform and analytics solution for the Fashion, Luxury and Cosmetic (FLC) industries, today announced that it has closed $50 million in financing led by Bpifrance, followed by Seventure, Cipio Partners and Famille C (Famille Courtin-Clarins). With the support of this funding the company's projected to grow from $25m to $100m in revenue over the next 4 years, leveraging an organic growth and a strategic M&A program.

"I am excited to share the news of our latest fundraising, it really highlights the contribution we have been able to bring to our customers and the industry to date," said Michael Jais, CEO of Launchmetrics. "As the leading marketing platform and analytics solution for the Fashion, Luxury and Cosmetics industries, I am confident this additional capital will help us accelerate our business across Asia, the Middle East and Europe as well as further invest in the development of cutting-edge data technologies that will transform the way marketing works for these industries in the future."

More than 1,000 brands and over 50,000 influencers in the Fashion, Luxury and Cosmetics (FLC) space rely on Launchmetrics' tools every day to help them identify the most influential voices in the industry, activate those voices and measure the results of their marketing and communication campaigns. The funding will help the business further support their existing clients and focus on growing each one of those relationships.

The company is set for rapid team expansion with over 150 new hires slated in the next two years in marketing, sales, software development and data. Additionally, there will be focus on product development and innovation, with specific attention to internal research being conducted in their Data Lab which is developing visual recognition algorithms to automatically tag brands, products and people from images created or shared by influencers, allowing brands to analyze the media impact value created directly from this user created visual content across web and social media. The capital will also be used to scale existing territories including the US, UK and Europe with a strong focus on growing markets such as Germany, Asia and the Middle East with heavy investment in data and social monitoring in Asia.

"Over the years we have helped build many successful companies and pride ourselves on our ability to identify those with a lot of potential. We have been very impressed with Launchmetrics' innovative technology, category authority and growth dynamics," said NicolasHerschtel, Deputy Managing Director, Large Venture at Bpifrance. "They have a strong vision for the future of Fashion & Luxury Technology and we look forward to being part of their journey as they become the worldwide leader in marketing solutions."

According to recent Luxury Insight and Bain reports, the marketing spend for FLC companies is estimated at $248bn annually and millennials already represent over 40% of luxury customers. With the rise of the millennial consumer and the return to authenticity in marketing strategies worldwide, brands are seeing a shift from traditional advertising to influencer (digital) marketing, creating a demand in the marketplace for companies who can facilitate those relationships between brands and influencers as well as benchmark & measure results within the industry through technology.

Today, Launchmetrics' team of over 40 data scientists and analysts work with the company's technology teams to develop proprietary algorithms that leverage AI technology and real machine learning to bring cutting-edge changes to FLC industries. They monitor over 20,000 brands daily as well as 50k media outlets and 100k influencers for:

-REAL-TIME BIG DATA
-Crawling, processing and augmenting in real time terabytes of data everyday coming from millions of website, blogs, professional social accounts and print data.
-CUTTING-EDGE MACHINE LEARNING
-Creating robust algorithms (deep learning) for text and image analysis in order to monitor trends linked to brands/events/people/product types across Print, Online and Social to produce industry benchmarking and trend insights as well as predict future campaign performance across these channels and voices
-GRAPH THEORY
-Innovative graph analysis algorithms to compute community-based distance between brands and map them into custom spaces where one can visualize their positioning in a market vs competitors or potential partners.

The company was founded in 2016 out of a merger by Augure (Paris), a global powerhouse in Influencer Marketing Software and Fashion GPS (New York), the premier technology provider of the Fashion Industry. Since then, the company has grown 100% adding top tier clients such as Givenchy, Swarovski, Swatch Group, Adidas, among others. This Fall, Launchmetrics will roll out its newest influencer relationship management tool across Europe with a global analytics platform launching in January 2019. The new tool will allow brands to understand how various marketing and communications activities impact their Brand Equity across different voices, channels, media types, time periods, products, regions and equates a monetary value to these projects to help them better arbitrate their budgets in the future as well as optimize campaign performance.

To learn more about Launchmetrics, please visit launchmetrics.com.