Lexer raises $25.5 million to unlock insights from retailers’ customer data

Lexer, a customer data platform (CDP) that helps retailers glean insights by unifying data from multiple systems and sources, has raised $ 25.5 million in a series B round of funding led by Blackbird Ventures and King River Capital.

The raise comes as businesses across the spectrum rush to capitalize on the accelerated digital transition that has been driven by the pandemic, with retailers in particularly eager to grow their online sales by better understanding who they’re selling to.

The core promise behind CDPs such as Lexer is that it’s designed to expand the utility of data analytics beyond data scientists to enable anyone, such as marketers, to derive key insights from their vast swathes of data.

“Brands are awash with data these days, but it’s siloed, and they have no way of sorting, managing, gleaning insights and taking action from it,” Lexer CEO David Whittle told VentureBeat. “Lexer allows them to collect and enrich fragmented data sources into a single customer view to genuinely understand and engage their customers in personalized ways.”

Indeed, retailers can compare and contrast myriad customer segments by whatever data points they wish to use, such as their engagement with marketing materials, their preferred shopping channels, the products they’ve purchased, their online activities such as social media posts, to figure out how well its marketing activities are performing and unearth new ways to unlock more revenues.

Above: Lexer’s customer data platform (CDP)

Founded out of Australia in 2010, Lexer populates a space that includes major players such as Adobe and Salesforce, which launched their own CDPs back in 2019, alongside newer companies such as SoundCommerce, which announced a $ 15 million raise earlier this week.

Whittle said that Lexer is setting out to differentiate itself by serving as a true end-to-end solution spanning, data, software, and team. “Our customers don’t need to engage expensive and time-consuming third-parties for strategy, implementation, customization and project management,” he said. “Also, our tools are beautifully simple, easy-to-use, accessibly-priced and have been built by one team, rather than a Frankenstein of acquisitions trying to play nice together.”

Prior to now, Lexer had raised around $ 8 million, and with its latest cash injection the company said that it plans expand its product and hire across its offices in Australia, the U.S., and Southeast Asia — it plans to hire a new person each week for the next year to double its overall headcount.