imagino raises €25 million series A to drive growth and international expansion
June 3, 2024
Europe
Investment led by Cathay Innovation and joined by henQ to support the martech company to deliver on its global ambitions with particular focus on the UK and US markets
imagino, a marketing technology provider headquartered in Paris, today announces the details of its €25 million Series A investment led by Cathay Innovation and joined by henQ. The investment will accelerate its growth in the UK, which is already seeing positive momentum, and support its launch in the US.
Already well-established in France, imagino is a revenue-first customer experience platform providing brands with clear and actionable insights through its Customer Data Platform (CDP) to enhance their marketing campaigns. From acquisition to reengagement, imagino’s approach enriches brands’ understanding of their customers and improves the ROI of marketing campaigns to create value in existing systems and build a better overall marketing experience.
Founded in 2017 by Stéphane Dehoche, Arnaud Chapis and Thomas Boudalier, imagino’s leaders have a track record of growing successful businesses. After successfully building Neolane into a world leader in marketing automation and campaign management, the trio was instrumental in the successful sale of the business to Adobe for $600 million. This acquisition formed a key part of Adobe’s Marketing Cloud.
The investment will support the company’s ambitious recruitment plans as it scales and build its presence in the UK and launch in the US this year. In addition, the funding will ensure significant resources can be devoted to its ongoing product development. The company has already tested its first generative AI feature, AI Copywriter, and additional investment will enable further development for generative and predictive AI features to give brands a competitive advantage.
According to Mordor Intelligence, the size of the marketing automation market is expected to reach $15.36 billion, up from $6.85 billion in 2024. Coupled with this, as the pace of AI adoption accelerates, so does the need for reliable data sources available to organisations, which in turn makes having a clear picture of customer data indispensable. Analysts expect the size of the AI market to grow by 24% every year until 2030 to reach an annual turnover of more than €200 billion. With GenAI making creating content easier and faster, deploying a safe and scalable platform to engage prospective customers is a key success factor for organisations.
Stéphane Dehoche, co-founder and CEO of imagino, comments, “From the start, we’ve always had significant ambitions for the company including international growth. With more than 60 brands seeing the value of imagino in France and the UK, we see even more opportunity in the United States, which is a key market for marketing automation.”
“Our demonstrable experience as seasoned entrepreneurs – evident through Neolane’s success – meant our conversations with investors were clear and productive. imagino is on the same success path as Neolane, but even faster and with more promise” continues Dehoche.
Cathay Innovation and henQ both have long-standing reputations supporting entrepreneurial businesses grow. Notable companies include Glovo (acquired by DeliveryHero), DataSine (acquired by Shutterstock) and Alkemics (acquired by Salsify) from Cathay Innovation and Mews, Sendcloud, Wemolo and Mendix from henQ.
“The imagino team is led by the most experienced entrepreneurs with a potent combination of both tech and Go-To-Market expertise with a proven track record” says Bruno Delahaye, Partner at Cathay Innovation. “They have developed a powerful tool to transform data into actions that create personalised, sustainable and seamless customer experiences. AI and international are at the heart of its strategy, and we believe that our knowledge of AI applications and our cross-border expertise will be valuable as it scales. ”
“The term serial entrepreneur is too often used, but it truly applies to the founding team of imagino. After founding their first company, which was as early as 1991, the team has been executing super strongly – being increasingly successful with each company they’ve founded. In 2024, 33 years later, we are incredibly impressed with their unwavering drive and unstoppable momentum. We are confident they will build something even bigger and better with imagino than all the great achievements they have realised before” adds Jan Andriessen, Partner at henQ.
Lindsay McEwan, Chief Revenue Officer at imagino, says, “Marketers in the UK are already well-acquainted with CDPs; but we hear time and time again from brands that they have a feeling of being let down by their tech investments seeing lacklustre results. In this increasingly competitive environment, marketers have no option but to deliver value for their organisations or fail. In just a short period of time, we’ve seen an overwhelmingly positive reaction from brands in the UK. This funding will ensure this momentum continues at scale.”
McEwan continues, “imagino is perfectly positioned to support brands right now. Instead of demanding heavy investment costs, imagino augments the technology already in place to ensure it delivers maximum value”.
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About imagino
imagino, founded in France in 2017, offers a customer data management platform and a campaign management solution designed to connect, unify and activate customer data. These two tools meet the needs of professionals in marketing, finance and customer relations departments, enabling them to deliver a seamless, personalised experience to their customers. With an automation system and the creation of a unified view, imagino enables companies to regain control of their customer data in order to reduce time to value, lower initial investment and accelerate return on investment.
About henQ
henQ is a B2B software-focused venture capital fund that backs the best European founders with €1M-€10M initial tickets. We love the odd ones out, businesses that are a little different and are, for example, active in a market that is considered “too boring”, have a business model that is a little atypical, or have founders whose passion is bordering on obsession. We do not do spray and pray: making only 2-3 new investments per year we aim for a 100% hit rate. With our fourth fund of €80M in size, we invest in founders rather than markets. Our distributed investment team sits in Rotterdam, Paris, Amsterdam and Zurich, investing in companies across Europe. Results so far have been great, with best in class ARR growth, capital efficiency and follow-on funding graduation rate – the latter being the metric we care about the least.
About Cathay Innovation:
Cathay Innovation is a multistage venture capital firm, affiliated to Cathay Capital, investing in founders building transformative businesses across Europe, North America, Asia, Latin America and Africa. Its platform connects founders with investors and its ecosystem of leading Fortune500 corporations to help startups scale and transform industries with consumer to enterprise and AI solutions in commerce, fintech, digital health and mobility / energy. Founded in Paris in 2015, Cathay Innovation now manages over €2.5B AUM with additional offices in Berlin, San Francisco, Shanghai and Singapore and has invested in over 100 startups including Chime, Pinduoduo (NASDAQ: PDD), Glovo, Wallbox (NYSE: WBX), Owkin, Getaround, Ledger, ZenBusiness, Alma, Descartes Underwriting and more.
To learn more, visit us at www.cathayinnovation.com or follow us on LinkedIn or Twitter @cathayinnov.