Tag management solutions (TMS) provider Tealium announced a $20 million round of funding on Tuesday, led by Silver Lake Water, which brings its total amount raised since January 2012 to $47.5 million. The fresh injection will be used to expand operations globally across engineering, sales, customer service and marketing.
The global expansion process is ongoing, and currently Tealium doesn’t have a set timeline, said company CFO Doug Lindroth. With offices in Germany, France, Spain and the Netherlands, portions of the new funding will be parceled out to adding resources to existing market operations in Europe. Funding will also help in current efforts to develop the APAC region. With offices already open in Singapore and Australia, Tealium and will focus next on Japan.
At its core, a TMS organizes the complex set of codes, or tags, firing off websites letting advertisers know that ads have been seen. The value proposition of TMS has since expanded as marketers and advertisers use more data sets to improve targeting and consumer insight. TMS has already taken off in Europe (where Tagman, before it was swallowed up by rival Ensighten, had significant presence) as well as North America, so it makes sense that Tealium would make further inroads into Asia.
China, with its massive population, is also an area where ad tech companies have tried to penetrate, though its culture and unfamiliar business landscape create challenges.
As for Tealium itself, the company’s value proposition is that it harnesses first-party data assets to improve the overall consumer experience. This is why Silver Lake Waterman Managing Director Shawn O’Neil foresees a strong future for TMS.
“Enterprises will continue to invest heavily in technologies that improve their customers’ experiences across all digital touch points, and we see Tealium as the market leader in the space,” he said.
There are, however, other technologies that offer overlapping capabilities, such as data-management platforms (DMPs). Tealium asserts, however, that the first-party data it collects feed into DMPs, the former supplementing the latter.
“That’s one of the important distinctions about Tealium,” said Lindroth, “We’re not trying to be a DMP. We’re making sure we’re neutral with all the digital marketing vendors. That way our customers are getting the best service, rather than it being a narrow focus by not working with DMPs.”
Besides global expansion, Lindroth also predicts future opportunities due to the so-called Internet of Things. That is, the proliferation of the Internet in traditionally non-connected household objects like speakers, refrigerators, televisions and thermostats.
Lindroth predicts these untraditional sources of data collection will facilitate demand for TMS. “As the Internet Of Things evolves,” he said, “more data will need to be collected and distributed. I think we’re going to be in the perfect position for that.”
Tealium’s funding announcement came in conjunction with the company’s Q1 earnings report, made public Tuesday Morning, which showed revenue growth at the rate of 120%.
