Intro

There are hardly any doubts that marketing, which helps companies to communicate their products to customers, is one of the most rapidly changing industries of the past decades. Technologies that were not considered seriously until recently, such as virtual or augmented reality, are now becoming the tools effectively used by many specialists on a daily basis. The figures provided by Hubspot suggest that 47% of clients are interested in buying products via AI-driven chatbots, another promising solution gaining popularity. In every part of the industry, from advertising and digital marketing to branding and market research, traditional approaches are substituted by new ones, more advanced and sometimes completely new. According to Forbes, the global marketing industry is now evaluated at $1.7 trillion and continues to expand. Given such numbers and pace of development, it is reasonable that martech startups attract attention and significant amounts of money from venture funds and corporate investors. For instance, over the past three years, $2.2B of seed investments were raised, making up almost 3% of the total sum of money invested at such rounds in the mentioned period. Out of those figures, $489M were provided by 20 investors, featured on the following diagram by amounts of money they invested recently:

Top 20 Seed Rounds Investors in Marketing Industry
data provided by Unicorn Nest

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Key takeaways

  • Funds Geography - Most common locations of the top investors for the marketing industry are North America and Eastern Asia. Over half of the VCs (12) are hosted in the US, mainly in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Indianapolis. As for Eastern Asia, most of the seed rounds investments come from Tokyo, Japan (hosts five funds from the list), and China. The tendency is for the VCs to invest in the countries of their establishment, so the money is mostly attracted by the US-based startups, with Japan, Panama, and China following.
  • Industry Focus - Commonly, the funds on the list invest in Finance: for instance, series A round, held on the 1st of July by Globis Capital Partners with some other participants, brought $152M to jusInCase, Japanese FinTech project. Among other examples are ImmunoScape (the US), GITAI (Japan), etc., which outline more spheres, attractive for the funds: Gamification, Autonomous Vehicles, and Bio & Nano Technology.
  • Important Years - The gap between the years of foundation of the oldest and the newest funds from the list is 36 years, with Daiwa Corporate Investment established in 1983 and MaC Venture Capital - in 2019. The majority of the funds were founded in 2015. 4 years later, in 2019, 7 out of 20 VCs closed the highest number of deals, while for the rest the period of active participation in seed rounds fell on the years of 2017, 2018, and, importantly, 2020. This indicates that the marketing industry is seen worth investing and keeps attracting VC firms even in recent unstable years.
  • Investments - VCs which invest the most in marketing usually take part in 2-6 rounds per year; however, for some funds, this figure can rise up to 12. On average, funds from the list participate in almost 160 rounds per year, with a minimum and a maximum number of rounds being 9 and 1627, respectively. Lead investments figures also differ: some firms on the list never acted as lead investors, while others acted as such much more often, as in the case with YCombinator and it's 506 lead investments performed. The mode and the median for the lead investments are 9, while the average number of investments of this kind is 37. In percentage points, the difference between lead investments lies between -42.43 and 29. Hence, particular funds, such as said YCombinator, become lead investors more often than others. The mode of the data is 29.0.
  • Typical Rounds - A typical round for the top seed investors in the marketing industry usually has from 2 to 4 participants and a size of 1-5 million. However, sometimes the amount of money per round is not more than 100 000. The average multiplicator, usually stated in the company's portfolio, varies from 0.06 to 0.5, with an average value for this figure being 0.2 and a median - 0.17.
In summary, VCs that invest the most seed funding money in the marketing industry are mainly located in North America and Eastern Asia and usually enter 2-6 rounds per year worth 1-5 million each. Such funds tend to perform rounds with no more than four partakers and focus on Finance, Autonomous Vehicles, Gamification, and Bio & Nano Technology.