- Mayan announced it raised $5 million in funding. These are the details.
Mayan – a fully-remote company that builds optimization and automation technology for Amazon sellers – announced it has raised a $5 million Series A round of funding, led by Bright Pixel (former Sonae IM). This added to the $2 million of seed funding Mayan had raised just a year prior from investors including Y Combinator, Global Founders Capital, Alumni Ventures Group, ESAS Ventures, and Alarko Ventures.
Mayan plans to use the capital to further accelerate the development of advertising automation and to launch a self-serve advertising solution. And this new solution will arrive at a lower price point than their base offering that includes an expert dedicated account manager. Plus Mayan is also releasing a free analytics and forecasting suite for Amazon sellers that seek a better understanding of their overall business performance.
In the first 3 months, customers see a 28% increase in ROAS (Return on Ad-Spend) and a 47% increase in ad sales. And within 3 months of working with Mayan, customers typically experience their highest ad-sales month in history, all while maintaining the same budget. Overall, Mayan has helped generate over $80 million in ad sales and drive over $160 million of total sales through Amazon in just over two years of operations.
Highlighting some of Mayan’s existing product features include keyword expansion, campaign creation, competitor targeting campaigns, and inventory-informed advertising efforts, all automated to help sellers get back to focusing on other key areas of their business.
There are more than 6 million sellers in the Amazon ecosystem worldwide. And to better serve these sellers, Amazon has quickly grown its in-platform advertising capabilities. Between 2018 and 2021 ad-spend on Amazon has grown from $7 billion to $31 billion.
For comparison, this is about half the revenue that Amazon generates through AWS and is already larger than YouTube’s ads business. And this growth and a new strategy for Amazon has impacted sellers in three ways: the company is becoming a pay-to-play platform with 40% of all sales preceded by an advertisement; advertising within Amazon is becoming more complex, as it continues to roll out new advertisement types; and the average cost-per-click will continue to rise.
Mayan is also launching a self-serve ads optimization tool for Amazon sellers. In addition, they are in the development phase of an inventory optimization product that will be launched in early Q2. In order to make sound planning decisions for their business, Amazon sellers need to understand what is going on in their business today and accurately project the future across both their topline and bottom line, which ads and inventory greatly impact, respectively.
Mayan’s product suite includes analytics, inventory, and advertising automation. And combining all of the data involved in growing an Amazon business, Mayan also makes forecasts so that sellers can have a better handle on key areas of their business.
KEY QUOTES
“We’ve heard from many of our customers that there is a gap in the solutions ecosystem for Amazon sellers. One of our differentiators is that our products are built alongside successful Amazon sellers, whether they are our customers or our teammates, some of whom are current or former sellers themselves. At Mayan, we help our customers by creating data-driven automations and insights that help fuel their growth.”
— Chris Compean, Co-founder and CEO
“Selling efficiently on Amazon remains extremely complex, requiring analyzing multiple data inputs and optimizing several dimensions, including advertising, inventory, and working capital. Mayan’s founders bring deep expertise from scaling numerous Amazon sellers. The platform they created enables sellers to leverage state of the art tech to drive optimization, with proven results increasing their customer base 5 times in a year.”
— Manuel Queiroz, Director at Bright Pixel Capital
“The Mayan team has deep industry, data, and automation expertise combined with an innovative and fresh take on how to empower Amazon sellers. This got us really excited to back them! I’m excited to see them continue to expand into other seller operations in the near future.”
— Aaron Epstein, a partner at Y Combinator
