Funding Tealium’s Global Expansion

Today we are excited to announce Tealium has raised $96 million in additional growth capital from two amazing growth equity firms, Georgian (Justin Lafayette and team) and Silver Lake Waterman (Shawn O’Neill and team), both of whom have been fantastic capital partners for Tealium since 2015 when Georgian led our Series D and SLW provided additional growth capital. This financing is a great milestone as we look back on the ten years since we first funded Tealium with a vision of enabling businesses to delight their customers with rich, real-time data from across the enterprise. 

In April 2011, when we led Tealium’s pre-seed round, we believed that as ‘software ate the world’ and as the ‘atomization of enterprise software’ populated companies with more and more specialized applications, the number of data silos was only going to increase. And we believed that companies and industries would benefit from a team of proven engineers that would build a neutral data platform that operated between the customer experience layer and the static database layer, eliminating friction and replacing asynchronous (batch file) point-to-point integrations with synchronous real-time API-powered integrations. 

As events have unfolded, this all looks obvious in hindsight, but I remember going up and down Sand Hill Road with our founders and hearing no after no from very smart investors who were (and still are) great personal friends. Luckily, there are nothing like a few polite rejections to motivate you, and it only takes a few yesses to get you going. Tealium’s founders (Mike Anderson and Ali Behnam) and I would like to thank Scott Bedford of Peninsula Capital Management and Powderbird for leading our Series A in 2011, and the teams from Revel Partners (Thomas Falk, John Vincent, Joe Apprendi) and ProductLab (Jim MacIntyre) who also participated, for backing us in those early days with the capital to assemble an amazing team of engineers to start building. We are builders and it takes capital to build a great foundation. Without those votes of confidence in the early days, Tealium would not exist and our 850 enterprise customers around the world would have less efficient digital operations today. 

We were then fortunate to catch the eye of Neeraj Agrawal at Battery Ventures in 2012, who led our Series B with a major investment at a critical time, and then Stewart Gollmer of Tenaya Capital, Salil Deshpande (now of Uncorrelated Ventures) and Presidio Ventures in 2013 to continue to fuel our growth. In 2019, these investors were joined by our great customers at ABN AMRO Bank (and ABN AMRO Ventures) and by value-add financial partners at Declaration Partners and Industry Ventures.

And now, in 2021 as the need for our solution has become obvious and we are rapidly scaling to service the largest companies in the world with a real-time customer data hub, we will use this additional capital to grow our team by 40% and scale our technology platform in all major regions around the world. We will be investing heavily in partner and ecosystem development, product development and customer success. Our expanded team will continue to deliver on Tealium’s mission to provide customers with deeper, more actionable insights about their customer data, and empower them to deliver personalized, omnichannel digital experiences that surprise and delight.

This investment is an enormous validation of the success the Tealium team has seen in the past year. We surpassed previous revenue records in 2020, as marketers turned to Tealium’s best-in-class technology stack to meet the challenges of the pandemic. COVID-19 forced a broad shift to digital channels at the same time as marketers faced third-party cookie loss and increasing data privacy regulation — a perfect storm of issues that proved a first-party data strategy is the core of modern marketing. Leveraging our customer data platform (CDP), we helped our 850 global enterprise customers build compliant but relevant digital experiences and realize business value quickly in this unstable environment. 

Since our founding, our obsession with customer success has driven us to innovate and evolve. We were recently delighted to add Carole McCluskey to our leadership team to help accelerate the adoption of Tealium’s solutions worldwide with industry expertise and a rapid-time-to-value approach. As we continue to pioneer new technologies our focus has always been on great and rapid results for marketers, and we are also finding smart early adopters outside of marketing that are using our platform for many creative and high-value use cases to drive incredible ROI. This is truly an exciting time and we feel we are just getting started. The future is real-time and we look forward to many more years of building, and partnering with our customers to advance their data foundations so they can thrive in the omnichannel future.