DN Capital invests in Performance Horizon Group

DN Capital, which invests in media and technology companies at the growth and early stages, has led a first round of investment in Performance Horizon Group (PHG), a provider of online performance marketing technology. The size of the round remains undisclosed.

Headquartered in the North East of England with offices in London and Luton, PHG’s founders include Malcolm Cowley and Paul Fellows who previously co-founded affiliate network buy.at which they sold to AOL for $125 million in 2008, who subsequently offloaded it for considerably less to London-based Digital Window. While more recently, Cowley and Fellows themselves invested in ShareMyPlaylists, the music social network built on top of Spotify founded by Kieron Donoghue.

PHG’s two main products in the so-called ‘performance marketing’ space are targeted at businesses who require greater accountability, transparency and control of performance partners across affiliate, email and lead generation. Its two main products are Leadsbox, a platform to manage leads bidding, tracking and scrubbing, and Performance Mash, which provides a range of technology and reporting products for the affiliate and partner marketing industries.

Specifically, PHG says that Leadsbox differentiates itself from incumbent offerings by utilizing the latest technology to do-away with big, cumbersome relational databases to serve data in near-realtime. “The speed that we can manipulate data has allowed us to offer reporting functionality which has not been available to clients using the traditional affiliate networks”, says PHG co-founder Paul Fellows.

In addition, PHG says that all of its products use the company’s own API, including for reporting functionality, meaning that partners who build their own wares on top of the API do so knowing that PHG are eating their own dog food.