Shopify powers a huge number of ecommerce sites, so it’s also no surprise that there’s a huge ecosystem of tools around it that helps these merchants manage all aspects of running their stores. Triple whale, a Columbus, Ohio-based startup, focuses on providing Shopify store owners with a single platform that brings all their analytics together into a single service to help them improve their conversion rates and gain better insights into their marketing campaigns. With all this data, the team is now also starting to build smart, AI-based tools.
The company announced today that it has raised a $25 million Series B round from NFX and Elephant, with strategic participation from Shopify itself. That’s in addition to the company’s $24 million Series A round in 2022 (led by Elephant) and its $2.7 million seed round (led by NFX). To raise this much these days, startups need to have a lot of traction. The team says it saw 1,400 percent year-over-year growth, with more than 5,000 brands now using its service. The company notes that these brands generated more than $14 billion in sales last year.
Image Credits: Triple whale
Triple Whale was co-founded by AJ Orbach (CEO), Ivan Chernykh (CTO) and Maxx Blank (COO). Orbach and Blank, who grew up together in the same neighborhood in Jerusalem, got into the Shopify ecosystem by running their own brands and stores on the platform, with Chernykh joining Triple Whale as their tech co-founder. The idea behind Triple Whale was to turn many of the processes they used to run their stores into a product.
“I took the spreadsheets that I used to track my ad spend and the overall KPIs that I needed to look at, and we took those and we produced it and turned it into a mobile app that a lot of people liked,” Orbach explains . “We took a lot of the playbook from what we learned in D2C with influencer marketing and really applied it to a community we found on Twitter – which was very influential in the D2C space and we used that playbook to get a lot of traction to get .”
Right around this time, in late 2020, Apple launched iOS 14 and with it its new privacy features. This meant that many store owners could no longer rely on the data they were getting from Facebook, so Triple Whale built one new attribution system for them (called Pixel) which is now the core of its platform.
AJ Orbach (CEO), Maxx Blank (COO) and Ivan Chernykh (CTO)
“The data that came from Facebook was just a mess. There was no way we could understand any of it. And so we said, we need to build attribution,” Blank explained. “First of all, our customers suffer because they have no visibility, but also, if we want to start automating buildings, we have to correct data.”
With Pixel, Triple Whale can provide first-party attribution and real-time data for merchants, but what the team is focusing on right now is building out the automation, machine learning, and generative AI-based tooling around it. Some of it is quite simple, like the new rules engine and the “AI Timing” feature that allows merchants to automate their media buying, for example.
“We’ll give you the best time to buy based on your data during the week, and then you can use our rules engine to, for example, disable the ad between 12 and 6 a.m. so you don’t waste time. ,” Blank explained.
Image Credits: Triple whale
Using generative AI, the team also plans to soon launch new services that will allow merchants to generate ad text and images. It’s also soon launching a new tool, Lighthouse, that looks for anomalies (perhaps a product is selling significantly faster than normal) and then alerts users and recommends possible actions to take advantage of.
As the founders pointed out, the core idea has always been to offer a centralized data platform, a layer of visualization on top, and then automation tools that help users leverage this data to grow their business.
The team tells me that many of the brands in service currently generate between $1 million and $50 million per year. But now that many larger brands are also starting to use his service, the team is also starting to look at how it can best serve these larger customers. The company’s pricing is based on the tools a trader wants to use, but the full-stack suite currently sells for $400/month, with the dashboard without Pixel attribution costing $100/month.
“Triple Whale has built an outstanding marketing analytics platform that provides multichannel merchants with the marketing insights they need in a rapidly evolving online retail landscape,” said Sabrina Frias, Corporate Development Manager at Shopify. “This strategic investment will help merchants better understand the impact of their marketing spend on scale operations. We look forward to seeing what this team can do!”
