San Diego company, Tealium makes software that aggregates customer data in real time across multiple collection points. Combining information from the web, mobile, offline sources, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices in real time, the company helps businesses deliver more personalized services to their customers.
Former WebSideStory colleagues Ali Behnam and Mike Anderson co-founded Tealium in 2008 as a tag management solution for businesses, government agencies, and corporations. In the context of web pages and emails, tags are embedded data collection tools written in JavaScript—think cookies for ad targeting or affiliate link performance tracking. These are useful to webmasters, advertisers, and marketers alike, but without an agreed standard of management, tags can quickly become unwieldy.
Tealium helps retailers eliminate the painful customer experience of serving them an ad for a product they just purchased, which every online shopper has undoubtedly experienced. This is powered by a product introduced in 2020 which uses machine learning to drive predictive analytics and optimize ad spend.
Now the company has announced that it has raised $96 million in a Series G funding round led by Georgian and Silver Lake Waterman. Now valued at $1.2 billion—and officially a unicorn—the company looks to accelerate its product development as well as its customer and sales teams.
Tealium continues to expand its product offerings, recently debuting its Private Cloud product as part of its technology infrastructure. It also added Predict ML, a built-in machine learning technology that allows users to view whether they have sufficient existing data to provide insights into customer behavior.
Since its founding, Tealium’s total equity capital raised is $231 million. The company employs 530 workers worldwide, including 230 in San Diego and plans to increase headcount by about 50%. On the customer side, Tealium said more than 850 global businesses use its customer data platform software to better understand their customers. The software is vendor-neutral, regulatory compliant, and supports integration with more than 1,300 other plug-in data collection and management products.
“A personalized buying experience is now as important as the quality of product or service being bought,” said Justin LaFayette, lead investor at Georgian. “Tealium’s customer data platform helps businesses gain a competitive advantage by providing the insights to deliver a highly personalized customer journey.”
