Ghent (Belgium), February 2nd, 2021 — The Belgian Customer Data Platform journy.io has received a €450,000 investment from Flanders Investment Company PMV, Amsterdam-based venture capital firm Peak, and serial tech entrepreneur Willem Delbare. The investment will be used to accelerate current AI developments as well as build out the core marketing and customer success teams for further growth.
journy.io was founded by Hans Ott and Yves Delongie to provide more and better customer data to marketing, sales, and customer support teams. Hans Ott explains: “If you look at today’s tools, customers are typically represented by their name, the company they work at, their phone number, their email… and maybe some additional fields people submit through a contact form on your website. Yet, there are no fields giving you a precise idea of which products or features that person is likely interested in; what channels and ads will be most successful in creating return visits to your website, what specific content was consumed as part of the buying journey; what type of buyer persona that person belongs to; or simply how likely she/he will be buying your product or service.”
“By exactly knowing how each person behaves on your website or in your app; and by continuously comparing each ‘journ(e)y’ with all other journeys from all other users and accounts,” Yves Delongie continues, “journy.io shows you a whole lot more about a person than what was originally submitted.” How exactly does this work? The platform provides GDPR-compliant contextual and behavioral (artificial) intelligence for all accounts and users. journy.io injects native app data and customer intelligence as simple custom fields in a company’s existing tech-stack, like CRMs, marketing automation tools, and other customer support apps. Teams can continue their work in their familiar environments but with much more actionable account and user data. This helps companies convert more, sell more, and churn less.
Enrich data with contextual and behavioral intelligence.
Sync all with the tools you already use.
Roald Borré, Head of Equity Investments at PMV: “We are impressed with the platform’s ease of use, and the level of accuracy from the enrichment data it produces, which makes the platform suitable for virtually all environments: Webshops and other B2C businesses, traditional B2B companies as well as multi-account-multi-user SaaS/tech ventures. We believe this technology may see quick market adoption, starting in the more-tech-mature SaaS markets, yet rapidly evolving to practically each organisation having a website.”jou
Johan van Mil, Co-founder and Managing Partner at Peak, a VC firm with investments in nearly 30 seed stage SaaS, marketplace, and platform companies across Europe, believes in journy.io’s ability to disrupt the way companies today collect and share data. “As a founder of data companies myself,” reflects van Mil, “I see a big opportunity for consumer and business-orientated companies to make their own data much more intelligent and actionable. And we believe that Yves and Hans are the right ones to capture this opportunity.”
Willem Delbare, serial tech entrepreneur, former co-founder Teamleader and early investor in journy.io, also sees that the way companies collect and share their data is broken, “I keep receiving requests to hook up our own app to our CRM and to ever-changing other marketing tools, in order to internally share what users are doing in our app.” A request that Delbare realizes is easier said than done, as he explains, “it is a lot of hard work to build, to secure, and to maintain…and certainly costly, too.” So when Delbare heard journy.io’s vision to empower teams to create and sync their own required intelligence, he remarks, “it totally made sense to me.”
A growing demand
The demand for customer data platforms is expected to grow substantially now and in the future, with estimates forecasting the $2.4 billion market will grow beyond $10 billion in the next five years (source: marketsandmarkets.com). Large marketing and tech tool vendors are clearly showing interest —Twilio (NYSE: TWLO) recently acquired ‘Segment’ for $3.2 Billion— and are mainly focussed on serving events-driven advertisement tools in large corporations. At the same time, there is a clear growing demand for an equivalent mid-market offering that wouldn’t require any investment in data science engineering, and which would support standard field-based syncing with a wide range of mid-market tools. journy.io’s ambition is to become the #1 customer data platform for that market.
About journy.io
journy.io is a cloud-based Customer Data Platform (CDP) that empowers marketing, sales and support teams to have more successful conversations with their customers by adding contextual and behavioural intelligence to the tools they already use. journy.io easily collects and unifies customer data from website and apps; builds intelligence from that data, and syncs it all with a wide range of customer apps. journy.io supports B2C, B2B, and SaaS environments.
More info on https://journy.io
About PMV (Participatiemaatschappij Vlaanderen)
PMV is a Flemish investment company that shapes the future of the Flemish economy. The fund finances promising companies from the very start, up to and including growth and internationalization. They offer tailor-made financial solutions to all entrepreneurs with a good business plan and a strong management team. It does this with capital, loans and guarantees. In addition, with and for the government, and other partners, it realizes projects that are important for prosperity and well-being in Flanders. PMV has a portfolio of 1.3 billion euros under management.