We are pleased to announce an $8M (£6.5 M) cash investment in Audiens from South Korea’s NHN Corp.
This is NHN Corp’s first investment in a European technology company.
The investment accelerates our international expansion plans and strengthens the team in key European markets. In addition to enriching our Audiens platform, the investment opens a new channel for NHN data technology to reach global markets.
NHN has vast quantities of consumer behavior data and is one of the few tech giants outside of Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft. Its focus on cloud, data, advertising, fintech and entertainment will enable Audiens to deliver unique competitive audience insight.
With the investment, we’ll augment our plug and play audiences to deliver automatic audience identification and prioritization technologies. We will also use advanced data processing techniques based on cloud data experience and machine learning techniques from NHN as well as embed new standard mathematical models into our customer data platform (CDP) and ramp-up data science capabilities to improve consumer behavior models within our platform.
Jonathan Brech, new CEO of Audiens says that industrial-strength audience segmentation capability is moving away from the IT domain within businesses and into the remit of the marketing team.
“Audiens lets marketers collaborate with colleagues on which ‘nudges’ work best to push different audiences to the next most desirable outcome — whether that’s buying media in a smarter way or messaging via email, messenger platform, etc. It’s a much faster way of understanding and responding to the ways your brand’s consumers are behaving,” said Brech.
JS Lee, Director of NHN, said Audiens has a unique vision to automate audience identification and optimization using data science and machine learning techniques. “By supporting them with our data science, technology and advertising leadership, plus our extensive customer insight data, we can deliver an exciting marketing game-changer,” said Lee.
“The continued evolution of CDPs as a result of the elimination of third-party data shows the strength of the CDP platform to marketers. CDPs are a critical technology to any marketer who needs to turbocharge their first-party data and build and manage audiences for engaging marketing campaigns,” said Brech. “They are the new must-have model for high-impact marketing and this investment from NHN proves the value of our technology platform.”
“Adding NHN’s technology and data science muscle to the simplicity and easy deployment of Audiens CDP platform, gives our global customers the ability to create marketing campaigns that create value faster for their brand,” added Brech. “The investment accelerates our data science studio capabilities and augments our international sales and marketing program.”