- Identity marketing SheerID announced it closed $64 million in funding led by CVC Growth. And the company revealed 450% revenue growth in the last 3 years.
SheerID — an industry leader in the identity marketing space — announced it has closed $64 million in funding led by CVC Growth Partners. CVC Growth is going to join SheerID’s board alongside Centana Growth Partners and Voyager Capital — which led SheerID’s earlier financing rounds in 2017 and 2015, respectively.
This round of funding comes on the heels of the company hitting 450% revenue growth over the last 3 years. In the last year, SheerID has expanded its customer base to include over 200 customers across a diverse range of Fortune 2000 B2C brands like Target, Amazon, Lowe’s, Comcast, Google, T-Mobile, and Urban Outfitters.
And brands use the SheerID Identity Marketing Platform to identify and acquire consumer tribes such as students, teachers, or the military with personalized offers backed by instant verification via 9,000 authoritative data sources.
“Our exponential growth is driven by major shifts in personalization, privacy, and performance marketing. Marketers are struggling to capture the attention of consumers who want more control over their personal data and less uninvited marketing from brands,” said SheerID CEO Jake Weatherly. “Our platform allows brands to create offers that honor and recognize an entire consumer tribe, increasing trust and word-of-mouth, and decreasing customer acquisition costs.”
According to WBR Insights, 80% of marketers felt more pressure to meet customer acquisition and revenue goals than they did the year prior with brand differentiation and the current privacy climate as their top two concerns. So B2C marketers across a number of industries are utilizing identity marketing, a new form of personalization focused on winning over consumer tribes that align with the brand’s promise.
“Gen Z is the future of streaming media. We knew our growth potential with this audience was vast and our personalized offer to students has taken off,” added Cheri Davies, Senior Director of Acquisition Marketing for Comcast. “Partnering with SheerID has given us a powerful new way to capture and retain our ideal customer segment.”
These consumer tribes share important aspects of their identity such as life stage, occupation, and affiliations. And they are socially connected and readily share information with each other like special product offers and brand experiences — which are exclusively provided by brands to their group. This has the double benefit of increasing marketing reach while decreasing customer acquisition costs. And this method often produces ROAS (return on ad spend) of 25:1 or higher.
“The most effective marketing does more than convert an audience, it provides a service they value,” explained Lauryn Nwankpa, Head of Social Impact for Headspace. “With SheerID, we can create unique offers for students and teachers that support them and move them to spread the word, which benefits the entire educational community and our business. Our identity marketing campaigns generate a powerful ripple effect that’s hard to match.”
SheerID now has 120 employees and the company plans to continue to grow in various areas of the business like marketing, sales, and engineering.
“We are incredibly excited to partner with the SheerID team in their next phase of growth,” commented Jason Glass, Senior Managing Director at CVC Growth Partners.
This round of funding will enable SheerID to expand its platform so companies in all geographies can engage an even broader range of consumer tribes related to occupation, interests, causes, and affiliations worldwide.
“As part of our long-standing efforts in fraud prevention and commerce enablement software, we identified SheerID as the industry leader in identity marketing and identity attribute verification.” Doug Behrman, Director at CVC Growth Partners, added, “SheerID’s track record and growth has been very impressive, and the company stands to benefit from powerful secular trends across privacy regulation, personalization, and eCommerce. We are proud to partner with a team that provides meaningful value not only to their customers, but to groups like students, first responders, and military veterans.”
In conjunction with this funding round, Glass and Behrman are joining SheerID’s board of directors.
