Ometria Raises Further $500K To Help Online Retailers Take Data-Driven Fight To Amazon

When Ometria, the UK e-commerce intelligence startup, raised a $1.5 million seed round back in March from 16 individual investors, I joked that one might call it a party round, albeit one that included an impressive list of entrepreneur-backers from the e-commerce, retail and SaaS worlds. Well, it seems the party continues.

Today the company is disclosing that it’s raised a further $500,000 in seed funding, adding another 17 investors. Once again, these span well-known individuals from the UK’s tech startup and e-commerce industry, including Alicia Navarro and Joe Stepniewski (founders of Skimlinks), Andreas Andreou (Commercial Director at Quidco), James Bromley (COO of Swiftkey), Jack Graham (founder of Raw Press Juice), and Luke Aviet (MD of AOL Advertising Europe). The early stage technology VC fund SaatchInvest also participated in this round.

Ometria helps online retailers make better use of data, and, in turn, compete harder with larger, more data-driven players in the market. It offers an e-commerce “intelligence” platform that provides retailers with insights relating to customer behaviour and product performance and enables them to take subsequent actions, such as follow up offers and further targeting — all in the name of attracting the right customers and boosting loyalty for existing ones, and shifting more product, of course.

Better data makes for better decisions and it’s here that tech giants such as Amazon have traditionally had a data-driven advantage over smaller e-commerce businesses, which is precisely what Ometria is trying to change.

To that end, the startup currently boasts customers such as furniture retailer Swoon Editions; fashion brand Bench; beauty brand Charlotte Tilbury; and knitwear brand John Smedley. I’m told it signed up its 100th retailer last week, and has so far created detailed profiles of over a million individual customers, “letting retailers better communicate with them through personalised messaging, and better optimise their marketing spend by identifying channels that drive better customers.”

Meanwhile, the new funding will be spent on further developing the product, including adding predictive modelling and more automated functionality for customer communication, so that retailers’ customer and product data will work harder for them.

Ometria’s service supports the main e-commerce platforms, including Magento, Shopify and Hybris, while the company charges a monthly subscription for use.