Capillary Technologies, an India-based marketing technology company which provides cloud-based customer engagement management software for retailers to engage with customers by delivering personalised shopping recommendations, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from American Express Ventures, the corporate venture unit of credit card company American Express. The funding, which will help fuel Capillary’s growth in the US and other markets, extends the company’s series A round of $15.5m, raised from Sequoia Capital, Norwest Venture Partners and Qualcomm Ventures. In total, Capillary Technologies has raised over $20m to date.
Harshul Sanghi, head of American Express Ventures, said: “Capillary has done a great job of creating a platform that helps retailers to capture and analyze data and then use insights to engage with shoppers across every sales and marketing channel.”
The investment follows the announcement, at the end of January 2014, that Capillary Technologies had formalized its partnership with American Express through a joint marketing agreement targeting select mid-sized retailers across the US.
Krishna Mehra, chief technology officer and co-founder of Capillary Technologies, explained to Global Corporate Venturing that Capillary’s technology, delivered through the cloud as pay-as-you-go, software-as-a-service, was making big data analysis more widely available to retailers – the kind of big data analysis first pioneered in the UK by Tesco and Dunnhumby. Mehra explained: “Bricks & mortar retailers are under so much pressure, not least from reduced spending, that they need to understand their customers – how, why and where they are spending.”