SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--AnyRoad, the leader in Experience Relationship Management (ERM), today announced that it has closed $9.2 million in Series A funding. The round, led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), includes participation from a16z’s Cultural Leadership Fund and previous investors Rally Ventures and Precursor Ventures. The company, founded by brothers Jonathan and Daniel Yaffe, is backed by Salesforce founder Marc Benioff, among others. In conjunction with the new round, David Ulevitch, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, will join the company’s board of directors.
AnyRoad’s Experience Relationship Management (ERM) platform is built for global brands to measure and optimize the effectiveness of their offline branded experiences. Enterprises that will dominate their industries over the next decade use experiences to connect on a deeper level with their customers and build lasting brand loyalty. While experiential marketing is the fifth largest marketing spend across the Fortune 2000, it’s the only category without dedicated digital tools or measurable ROI. AnyRoad’s software is built to use data to optimize this ROI on live dashboards, provide real-time actionable insights, and build measurable emotional connections with customers.
“We’re moving rapidly from a things economy into the Experience Economy,” said Jonathan Yaffe, co-founder and CEO of AnyRoad. “Everything about offline engagement and marketing has changed, and partnering with a16z on our new funding continues to validate that fact. Businesses are realizing that developing authentic and personal connections to a brand are the primary driver of future business. However, as other marketing activities have become more measurable, most marketing executives struggle to capture the value of experiences and understand true ROI. We are spearheading an ecosystem that will connect experiences to long-lasting customer relationships and ultimately, increased profitability. The only businesses that will still exist in 10 years are the ones that use experiences to connect with their customers and understand how these experiences change behavior.”
According to research by Event Marketer, 85% of consumers are likely to purchase after participating in events and experiences and 91% have more positive feelings about brands after attending. As a result, 86% of brands either increased or maintained their event and experiential programs in 2018, with that number poised to rise this year if recent trends continue.
“Since its inception, AnyRoad has pioneered Experience Relationship Management,” said David Ulevitch, general partner, Andreessen Horowitz. “Brands want to form closer relationships with their customers and in turn, customers look to brands to offer enriching and engaging product experiences. The thousands of companies that have already turned to AnyRoad are a testament to the vision of its founders, the quality of its platform, and the value it provides their customers – all of which combine to make it an irresistible investment.”
In the past year, AnyRoad experienced rapid growth as brands increased their spend on embracing the experience economy, with over 3x growth in revenue, and new enterprise customers including Anheuser-Busch, Michaels, and Tabasco. The funding will enable AnyRoad to accelerate and scale as it increases the capabilities of its platform, deepens its integrations with other technologies, and continue to help the world’s best brands and retailers to manage and deliver world-class customer experiences.
“Since moving to AnyRoad we’ve seen a spike in revenue, as we use analytics to make the best business decisions on our experience programs,” said Glenn Cox, Manager of Brewery Experiences at AB-InBev. “Further, by collecting more data on our visitors, we’ve been able to make decisions on new programming, brand loyalty trends, and purchase behavior. AnyRoad’s platform is creating significant gains in revenue enabling us to reinvest in our business.”
“When it comes down to it, it’s all about the relationships that these experiences build,” added AnyRoad’s other co-founder and COO, Daniel Yaffe. “As we design the ERM ecosystem, we’re imagining what Salesforce would look like if it were built today for the experience economy.”
About AnyRoad
AnyRoad is the Experience Relationship Management (ERM) platform enabling global brands to properly measure, scale, and implement their experiential marketing campaigns. AnyRoad helps companies create brand loyalty, change consumer behavior, and better understand their brand associations by providing them with data intelligence sourced from experience-based marketing. Companies like Anheuser-Busch, Honda, Michaels, and AEG all count on AnyRoad to measure the impact of their experiential marketing. AnyRoad’s software integrates into CRM, loyalty, ERP, and POS systems to complete the loop, building the model of exactly how these experiences build loyalty, increase brand perception, and increase revenue.
For more information, please visit www.AnyRoad.com or follow on Twitter and LinkedIn.
