The funding will be used to develop industry-first tech and data solutions to optimise the marketing funnel for D2C companies, as well as a best-in-class service infrastructure enabling customers to sample items on-demand, according to the startup.
Smytten is a platform that allows companies to interact with customers via sample and interaction. In its Series A round, the business received $6 million in investment from Fireside Ventures.
The new funding will be used to develop industry-first technologies that assist D2C businesses to optimize their marketing funnels, according to the company.
What exactly does it do?
Smytten is a platform that allows advertisers to reach millions of customers through targeted product samples in a variety of areas. After consumers have done sampling, its data-driven technique gathers real-time input from them.
Smytten’s platform is already being used by over 700 D2C businesses to reach their target audience at scale and provide a first-hand product experience. Plum, mCaffeine, Mamaearth and other brands are among them.
Problem it addresses
Swagat is a co-founder of Smytten, an Indian business that aims to create an environment for early-stage Internet firms.
When I joined Google, we were talking about 10 million smartphone users in the country. And by the time I left, Google India was almost seeing like 200 million smartphone users. In my last role, I was heading the business product marketing and a lot of brand initiatives at Google. I worked on things like online shopping festival and evangelizing digital and internet in the ecosystem, added Swagat.
According to him, India is an under-branded market since it is a highly under-established market in comparison to the United States and other developed countries.
Swagat stated that with the increase of consumerism in India and the emergence of new brands, they saw a potential to produce value for investors.
He indicated that the major channel for involvement will be digital. The second insight they discovered was that, while there was a difference between those who were interacting and those who were buying the goods online, there was a big gap between those who were buying the product and those who were not.
Small D2C companies will find it increasingly difficult to compete in this area as digital becomes the dominant channel.
Siddhartha and Swagat worked together at Unilever in London and Southeast Asia. Their efforts aided the company’s numerous objectives.
We found that no matter what we tried, there was enormous pilferage across the whole value chain,” Swagat said, “and there was simply no data feedback loop that existed to at least establish a ROI for the brands or assist them make specific proactive decisions based on this sample.
Smytten is a business that has received early funding from some of the region’s most well-known investors. Rajan Anandan, the former MD of Google India and Southeast Asia, is one of them.