UK software start-up secures new funding to prime itself for growth and deliver advanced data-driven personalised marketing and customer engagement for telecom operators
9th November 2022 – Ikue, the UK-based innovative customer data and personalisation start-up focused exclusively on the telecoms sector, has secured £2.25m in growth capital from private investors in a new seed funding round. Ikue will use the seed investment to fund the ongoing development of its Ikue Customer Data Platform (CDP) for midsize telecoms operators worldwide. Ikue will also use the investment to fund new staff recruitment and international sales and marketing activity.
Ikue’s CDP is designed to solve the unique challenges of the telecoms market and is based on decades of direct experience by a team of senior telecoms technologists and marketers.
The Ikue platform was developed specifically to enable and deliver accurate and effective customer engagement for marketers at telecom operators. It differs dramatically from enterprise applications such as CRM and generalist CDPs in that its primary purpose is enabling personalisation at scale for marketing. Ikue officially launched the solution at Digital Transformation World (DTW) in Copenhagen in September.
Bronwynne Stoddart, Ikue co-founder and CEO, commented, “The Ikue CDP has been designed and built from the ground up by a team of telecom experts with a combined 25+ years’ experience in the telecoms industry. The opportunity we offered for investors to join the seed investment round was to support the acceleration of the current prototype version to a fully operational revenue-generating minimum viable product (MVP): and also to help scale the business.
“We are delighted to have not only hit but exceeded our investment target, and thank our new and existing investors for their support and confidence in the Ikue proposition and the technology behind it,” she added.
Ikue offers midsize telecom operators in crowded competitive markets a unique opportunity to grow their business against their bigger rivals. For many operators, the cost of meeting growing customer demand and improving their experience with a superior quality of service is increasing the pressure on already squeezed margins. Intense competition for customers and market share is being driven by price-led promotions by operators and robust regulatory environments. The result for operators is falling prices, double-digit customer attrition and vanishing margins.
Stoddart continued, “In a post-pandemic environment, operators must maximise new revenue streams and accelerate the digitisation of processes and customer touchpoints in order to manage costs and improve margins. Globally, B2C telecoms revenues are stagnating and expected to be around one percent for 2022. Operators growth strategies are focused on connectivity and new services, and they must adopt a data-driven approach to targeting consumers to achieve these growth objectives to deliver better, healthier margins. This will allow them to justify CAPEX investments to support the demand for increased connectivity and superior customer experiences. This is how Ikue can add unique value and is what attracted new and existing investors to subscribe in this investment round.”
– ENDS –
Notes to editors
About Ikue
Ikue is a marketing technology company innovating with customer data to power personalisation for telecom operators. Ikue’s Customer Data Platform is the first CDP built for telcos that stitches customer data together with super low latency events in a single location to enable the execution of personalised marketing, sales, and service messages at the right time in the right channel. The cloud platform can resolve cross domain identity, has data science/ML capabilities for fast build and deployment of analytics and ships with out of the box connectors to commonly used data and marketing activation applications. Built for telco by telco.
Website: https://ikue.io
Press contacts:
Alex Sowden, Matt Flack or Lydia Van Wyke
Spreckley PR
T: +44 (0)207 388 9988
E: Ikue@spreckley.co.uk
Source: RealWire