MikMak
Wavecrest Growth Partners led the Series A round, which included existing investors including Luminari Capital and Brave Ventures, and new investors including Lunch Partners and Madrona Venture Group.
The funding comes as brands increasingly adapt to e-commerce at a faster clip amid the pandemic, with mobile e-commerce sales poised to hit $250 billion in 2020. MikMak said it works with more than 150 brands and retailers including Colgate, L’Oréal, Hershey’s, Petco, and P&G, and that its revenue grew 50% between March and June.
Until recently, MikMak helped brands and retailers sell products on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. But in February, the startup shifted gears to becoming an enterprise-software platform that it says can help brands optimize their online sales.
MikMak can show brands their e-commerce business in one spot through a new product, MikMak Dashboard, that shows what channels, audiences, and creative drive sales, MikMak founder and CEO Rachel Tipograph told Business Insider earlier this year.
“I realized that from a product-development perspective, I could build something that wasn’t just useful to the digital and social team, but also to the CRM team, shopper-marketing team, and the consumer-insights team,” Tipograph said. “I wasn’t providing visibility for what was happening real time in the market across platforms and retailers. And that’s why I decided to build this product.”
MikMak says it can help companies make better and faster e-commerce decisions
MikMak says the dashboard can help companies manage and track their sales across platforms and retailers based on channels, location, and influencers, and show what products are doing well by platform or retailer.
Hershey’s and Petco said they have seen positive results from using the platform.
MikMak helped Hershey nudge consumers to not just buy products but also buy them in the right context, Doug Straton, the company’s chief digital officer, told Business Insider in February. The company saw conversion rates higher than the industry average while testing the dashboard between December 2019 and February 2020, he said.
Petco credits MikMak with helping it attract more brand vendors by letting Petco give the vendors control over their shopping experience, Tariq Hassan, Petco’s chief marketing officer, said in February. It’s also helped Petco reduce bounce rates on its own website by 23%, he said.
But competition is heating up
MikMak started out making short and catchy infomercials on behalf of brands on social platforms, then it built video technology to enable shopping on platforms. But with platforms like Instagram building their own checkouts, competition is heating up.
Tipograph said those checkouts were just those platforms, while MikMak is building consistent storefront across channels with standardized reporting.
