Shopify has invested in Ohio-based startup Triple Whale, an e-commerce analytics aggregator. The data platform of Triple Whale enables Shopify merchants to unify business metrics into a single dashboard. This allows store owners to boost their conversion numbers and gain better insights into their promotional campaigns. The company announced that it has raised $25 million in its Series B round with “strategic participation from Shopify”.
Triple Whale is a recent addition to the investment portfolio of Shopify. The e-commerce giant largely aims at supporting companies that help Shopify merchants. The investment made by Shopify has not been disclosed by Triple Whale.
We initially built Triple Whale to help us sell more, but immediately realized that we could help thousands of other entrepreneurs in our same position.
Maxx Blank, COO, Triple Whale
The $25 million Series B round has been raised from NFX and Elephant. In 2022, the Series A round of $24 million was led by Elephant and its seed round of $2.7 million seed round was led by NFX. According to the Triple Whale team, the company witnessed 1,400 percent year-over-year growth, with more than 5,000 brands availing of its service. The company also added that its customers made over $14 billion in sales last year.
About Triple Whale
Established in 2021, Triple Whale was co-founded by former startup founders AJ Orbach (CEO), Ivan Chernykh (CTO) and Maxx Blank (COO). Before founding Triple Whale, Orbach established Webbing.me, a group management platform while Black founded businesses that helped college students get campus housing and deals as well as a fashion brand for women. On the other hand, Chernykh who was a full-stack engineer joined the team as a technical co-founder.
The core idea behind founding Triple Whale was to turn processes used to run stores into a product. The team always wanted to offer a centralized data platform, a layer of visualization along with a set of automation tools that assist merchants to use the data for their businesses growth.
âWhen AJ and I built our first two e-commerce stores, we had zero visibility into which channels were helping drive revenue and which were a total waste of money. We initially built Triple Whale to help us sell more, but immediately realized that we could help thousands of other entrepreneurs in our same position,” Blank said as quoted by techcrunch.com.
âI took the spreadsheets that I was using to track my ad spent and the overall KPIs that I needed to watch, and we took that and we productized it and made it into a mobile app that a lot of people liked. We took a lot of the playbook from what we learned in D2C with influencer marketing and really applied it to a community that we found on Twitter â which was very influential in the D2C space and we used that playbook to get a lot of the traction,” Orbach told the website.
Pixel by Triple Whale
With the launch of Apple’s iOS 14 and its updated privacy settings, store owners could no longer depend on Facebook data. Hence, Triple Whale built Pixel, a new attribution system for e-commerce merchants. “The data coming from Facebook was just a mess. There was no way we could make any sense of it. And so we said, we have to build attribution,â explained Blank.
âFirst of all, our clients are suffering because they donât have visibility, but also, if we want to start building automation, we need to correct data,” he added.
The team at Triple Whale plans to launch services to help store owners generate ad copy and images. This will be done with the help of generative AI and is expected to be rolled out in near future. The company will soon launch a new product, Lighthouse that works to find anomalies (for example- a product that is selling more quickly than usual) and notify users and suggests potential actions to maximise benefits.
Headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, the company is also based in Jerusalem, Austin and North Carolina. The client base of Triple Whale consists of more than 5000 brands including Obvi, Portland Leather Goods and True Classic. Last year, the company announced that it raised $24 million in a Series A round led by Elephant and a previously undisclosed seed round of $2.7 million led by NFX. Triple Whale also closed an additional $1 million with participation from entrepreneur and investor Shaan Puri, who is based in San Francisco.
According to Triple Whale, many of its clients are generating between $1 million and $50 million annually. The company plans to use this fund to âkeep up with customer demand ⌠expand to larger brands, and double-down on its investment into artificial intelligence and automation.â
Shopify Funding
âTriple Whale has built an excellent marketing analytics platform that equips multi-channel merchants with the marketing insights they need in a fast-evolving online retail landscape. This strategic investment will help scaling merchants better understand the impact of their marketing spend to scale operations. We look forward to seeing what this team can do!,” Sabrina Frias, corporate development manager at Shopify told the website.
In October 2022, Hong Kong-based company WATI (WhatsApp Team Inbox) announced that it closed $23 million USD in Series B funding with participation from Shopify. WATI provides customer sales and engagement tools for WhatsApp for Business. Its platform is built on WhatsApp’s Business API with the help of which merchants can send customised notifications to customers to boost their sales.
Among other companies backed by Shopify include Toronto-based digital logistics startup Swyft and Loop, an American startup providing an exchange-first returns platform for Shopify stores.
Shopify’s Intent
With these strategic investments, Shopify has the potential to earn profit. It was one of the beneficiaries of Affirm, a âbuy-now-pay-laterâ company that went public on Nasdaq in 2021. At the time of Affirm’s IPO, Shopify owned more than 20 million shares worth approximately $2 billion.
Buy now, pay later (BNPL) is short-term financing that enables customers to make purchases and make payments later. The popularity of this new twist in installment-based lending is lately soaring because they are more user-friendly than credit cards. The loan provided to customers are usually small and repaid within a short period.
Affirm collaborates with the online stores of its merchant partners, and then appears as a payment option on the checkout page. Buyers can finance their purchases within a few clicks. Affirm has a transparent fee structure which includes an annualized interest rate of between 0% and 30%. It also discloses the all-inclusive price of the purchase. If the customer repays the loan in four installments in two-week intervals, no interest or fees will be charged.
Besides funding, Shopify has acquired multiple companies to strengthen its merchant support ecosystem. In 2022, Shopify acquired Deliverr, a San Francisco-based shipping services provider Deliverr and Handshake, a New York-based B2B commerce wholesale platform.
