Sunny Cha
June 2, 2016
San Francisco – June 2, 2016 – Tenjin, the mobile marketing infrastructure company, announced today that it has raised an additional $2.5 million in funding to simplify and improve mobile marketing by giving marketers complete control over their user data. The round was led by NetEase Capital, the venture arm of the NASDAQ-listed Chinese Internet company NetEase, with participation from angel investors Herman Yang and Waikit Lau. Previous funding came from Y Combinator, Lightbank, and angel investors Eric Wu and David King.
“We experienced first-hand how fragmented and messy the mobile marketing industry is, and how much app marketers struggle to access and organize the raw data that can really help grow their mobile app businesses,” said Christopher Farm, Tenjin co-founder and CEO. “Our goal is to help developers connect the digital dots in a user’s lifecycle using a single service and platform. We intend to give developers complete control over their marketing data so they can structure it however they need to in order to run smarter, more effective marketing and growth campaigns.”
Today’s app marketers must manage multiple 3rd party vendors for app analytics, source attribution, and campaign data aggregation, wasting valuable time and leaving them unable to tie ad spend to post-install behavior data for an accurate picture of user-level return on investment (ROI). If they want to build their own data models, app developers waste engineering resources building and maintaining a complete data warehousing infrastructure.
Tenjin provides a centralized service and platform designed to streamline mobile marketing by tying analytics, attribution and ad network data aggregation together using a single dashboard. The company also gives its customers direct and configurable access to the data infrastructure that powers their dashboards as if it were their own. This allows developers to become more sophisticated as their user acquisition efforts scale without needing to build anything.
Tenjin is the first platform to combine advertising cost data with in-app payment revenue and ad revenue to provide marketers with the total ROI for each and every user. It is also the first platform to account for advertising revenue when calculating user LTV, enabling marketers to get a more accurate picture of campaign ROI beyond in app purchases, payments, or subscriptions. The company’s DataVault infrastructure offers a flexible, customizable data warehouse that gives marketers direct access to user-level data so they can perform custom analyses without having to build their own data pipelines and warehousing solutions. DataVault is available as an integrated component of the Tenjin platform or for use with third-party analytics, attribution and aggregation providers.
Tenjin has grown quickly since its launch in August of 2015, now serving clients such as Yelp, Natural Motion, Playdots, N3twork, KLab and many more. The company has processed over $100 million in ad spend and nearly $25 million in ad revenue in less than a year. It currently processes over 300 million events each month. Tenjin is integrated with more than 70 advertising and media partners, with more being added every week. Co-founders Christopher Farm and Amir Manji were early contributors to the growth of the mobile marketing platform Tapjoy.
The financing will enable Tenjin to develop new offerings to help developers grow their mobile apps and obtain infrastructure that they don’t have time to build. To meet rising demand, Tenjin will also use the funding to hire aggressively for key roles in engineering, product, business development and account management.
“Tenjin is solving a very common and frustrating problem that plagues app marketers of every size: getting access to the data they need in order to run smarter, more effective campaigns,” said Herman Yang, a startup advisor and early employee at Admob (acquired by Google) and Mopub (acquired by Twitter). “Large app developers have been building internal warehouses for a long time, but Tenjin will level the playing field for those developers who don’t have marketing infrastructure yet.”
