Consumer insights platform Zappi, which is used by the likes of McDonald’s, Heineken and PepsiCo, has secured a $170m (£138.5m) investment led by Sumeru Equity Partners.
Businesses or individuals can use Zappi’s platform to automate the process of analysing marketing and branding campaigns, along with optimising areas such as advertising and product development.
Zappi plans to use the investment to increase its data sets in “new markets, verticals and categories”.
“Zappi has a bold vision for the future: we want to digitise consumer insights for every enterprise,” said Steve Phillips, CEO and co-founder, Zappi.
The business is headquartered in London, where the ‘majority’ of its more than 300 staff work. Founded in 2012, it now has further offices in Boston and Cape Town.
Matt Cahill, senior director, head of consumer insights at McDonald’s USA, said: “We started working with Zappi in 2018, to change the role of insights in our innovation development process. We wanted to get smarter, earlier in the process, to deploy McDonald’s development resources against ideas we knew were winners with a high probability of success.’
In addition to Zappi, PepsiCo uses British data analytics startup Black Swan Data to evaluate consumer behaviour.
Last month, California-based Sumeru Equity Partners closed $1.3bn (£1.1 bn) for its Fund IV.