Triple Whale raises $25m for smart ecommerce platform

  • February 13, 2023
  • Steve Rogerson

Ohio-based ecommerce start-up Triple Whale has raised $25m in series B funding to help development of its smart data platform.

The company plans to use the funds to keep up with customer demand for its proprietary attribution technology, expand to larger brands, and double-down on its investment into AI and automation.

When operating an ecommerce brand, merchants typically have multiple apps to manage various aspects of their business. The challenge, however, is that each app produces its unique set of disparate data, unable to portray adequately a holistic view of a business’s health. From marketing analytics across various channels, to creative analysis, to inventory planning, a merchant is left with the inability to confidently make decisions to scale their business.

Triple Whale was founded by Maxx Blank, AJ Orbach and Ivan Chernykh, former ecommerce sellers and start-up entrepreneurs who set out to create the tools they wish they had.

“When AJ and I built our first two ecommerce stores, we had zero visibility into which channels were helping drive revenue and which were a total waste of money,” said Blank, COO of Triple Whale. “We initially built Triple Whale to help us sell more, but immediately realised that we could help thousands of other entrepreneurs in our same position.”

Triple Whale provides three layers to solve this problem. The first layer is centralisation, aggregating and connecting data from multiple sources into one unified platform. The second layer is visualisation, which serves as a stock-ticker of sorts for a brand. Along with first-party attribution and real-time collection of data, Triple Whale’s mobile-first dashboards enable merchants to have a round-the-clock pulse on their business, right from their pockets.

The third layer is automation, where Triple Whale uses AI to help its customers leverage their first-party data to save time and make more money.

The company recently released a rules engine, which enables merchants to create smart automation for their media buying efforts. It is about to launch a full-cycle generative AI platform to analyse, generate and deploy creatives, and it has a slew of other AI products in its 2023 product roadmap.

The $25m series B funding came from NFX and Elephant, with participation from Shopify. The funding comes after an explosive year with more than 1400% YoY growth to more than 5000 paying brands generating $14bn in sales including True Classic, Obvi and Portland Leather Goods.

“Triple 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,” said Sabrina Frias, corporate development manager at Shopify. “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.”

From the beginning, Triple Whale built a large and passionate community of merchants who helped the company quickly iterate and build products that gave its customers an advantage over their competition. Triple Whale is on a mission to democratise the latest advancements in AI and automation to empower small and medium-sized ecommerce businesses to transform their data into profitability.

“I’m continuously blown away by the level of enthusiasm Triple Whale sees from their community of ecommerce sellers,” said Gigi Levy Weiss, general partner at NFX. “The best founders know and live the problems they’re solving, and this is exactly the case with Maxx, AJ and Ivan.”

Founded in April 2021, Triple Whale is a smart data platform for ecommerce brands. Its platform combines centralisation, visualisation and attribution in a simple, actionable dashboard, empowering over 5000 ecommerce brands with the ability to transform their data into profitable growth. Headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, Triple Whale has hubs in Austin, North Carolina and Jerusalem.