Simple, an Australia-based business that operates a platform for managing marketing strategies and campaigns, has pulled in $17 million to expand its business in the U.S. and other global markets.
The round was led by BBRC Private Equity, the fund from multi-millionaire retailer Bretty Blundy, with participation from existing backer Perle Ventures.
Unlike most marketing services out there, Simple doesn’t involve itself in execution. It instead is “upstream planning,” which essentially means it helps teams to manage their campaigns by focuses on areas like planning, budgeting, organization, analysis and more. The primary idea is to increase efficiency and value for money from marketing, particularly across the complexity of large and global organizations.
Simple recently tie-up with Microsoft over the launch of its new ‘intelligent market platform’ which, unveiled at Microsoft’s Inspire partners’ conference in Las Vegas, is built on top of the tech giant’s Azure platform. It offers integrations with services like Microsoft Office that are handy for organizations that find themselves working deep in the Microsoft services burrow.
Simple CEO Aden Forrest told TechCrunch in an interview that Simple’s clients span a range of industries, including areas like banking, retail, insurance, gambling. That base is global, but Forrest wants to push on to exploit further opportunities in regional markets.
“This round is about how can we can take what we’ve learned and scale it up and take it global,” he said. “We feel there’s a phenomenal opportunity to take what we’ve learned and push it up through Asia, into the U.S. and across Europe.”
Simple CEO Aden Forrest. Photography by Quentin Jones. 26 Oct 2017.
Forrest, whose past stints include a spell as head of enterprise sales at Salesforce Australia/New Zealand, said Australia will remain HQ and tech center for Simple, but the firm plans to deploy local sales and marketing teams in markets were it spies opportunities to go deeper. That’s likely to include the U.S. for sure, although the company already operates a distributed customer service team to cater to its global clientele.