Dive Brief:
- According to VB Profiles, funding was down after 2014’s $47 billion, but the marketing technology sector did reach $17 billion in funding in 2015, spread over 313 companies, and there was $87 billion in martech exits.
- Funding leaders included Pinterest, Snapchat, Square and AppDynamics. Salesforce Ventures led investors with 16 martech investments.
- In terms of exits, PayPal led the way with a $44 billion IPO, followed by First Data with its $14 billion IPO and Informatica’s $6.4 billion acquisition.
Dive Insight:
Venture Beat, owner of VB Profiles, described the 2015 martech marketplace as exciting and the exits as significant, adding in an article on the topic that “the space continues to grow in both new products and improved penetration at mid-sized and larger company levels.”
Meanwhile, a report from Datanyze from last year crawled more than 40 million websites to find tags or code indicating the presence of martech. The results of this research found martech use up across six categories: marketing automation was up 4%, email marketing 3%, analytics 5%, tag management saw the largest growth at 9%, ecommerce 2%, and web personalization was up 7%. The research also found that martech use was most popular on B2B websites.
Integrate CMO Scott Vaughan, told Marketing Dive last fall, "While it may seem like there is martech convergence today because of the race to capitalize on this need, convergence is not happening yet. The number of new players entering the market is outrunning convergence today."
Venture Beat sees 2016 as bringing more products and more fragmentation, but also some measure of consolidation.
