16 Fast-Growing Marketing Startups (2023)
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Marketing has never been more critical to standing out from the competition. After all, more companies than ever before are competing for valuable consumer attention.
The total global market size of the digital marketing space is projected to reach $786B by 2026. And many marketing startups are emerging to improve email marketing, SEO, and personalized experiences.
Read below for our list of digital marketing startups that are pioneering the latest technology to influence smarter e-commerce purchases, allow marketing teams to build cutting-edge apps, and harness the power of influencers to build trust.
1. TapCart
5-year search growth: 850%
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2017
Location: Santa Monica, California
Funding: $65.1M (Series B)
What they do: Building a successful e-commerce app is usually an extremely time-consuming process requiring input from marketing, IT, and numerous other teams within a company. TapCart gives marketers the ability to create their own mobile apps with a no-code platform that uses drag-and-drop technology, much like a Canva for design.
One of TapCart’s core differentiators are their innovative push notifications, which they claim have a 10x open rate as compared to traditional email. E-comm stars like Figs, Chubbies, and FashionNova all count TapCart as a marketing partner.
2. Canva
5-year search growth: 1011%
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2012
Location: Sydney, Australia
Funding: $572.6M (Series Unknown)
What they do: Canva is the original “no-code” drag and drop design platform that is wildly popular among marketers for the variety of design choices and ease of use. Videos, presentations, social media posts, the list of applications is virtually endless. Used by over 60 Million people worldwide and enterprise brands including Marriott, Baxter, PayPal, and American Airlines, Canva is one of the most successful marketing startups of all time.
Their latest round of $200M led by T. Rowe Price places them at a $40B valuation.
3. Attentive
5-year search growth: 1100%
Search growth status: Regular
Year founded: 2016
Location: New York, New York
Funding: $863M (Series E)
What they do: Attentive was one of the first players in the SMS marketing space. Almost 40% of e-commerce purchases were made via mobile phone in 2018, and the importance of smartphones to the e-commerce industry is very likely to continue to rise. Attentive’s aim is to dominate the mobile, personalized marketing industry and also enhance their partnerships with platforms like Shopify.
4. Klaviyo
5-year search growth: 754%
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2012
Location: Boston, Massachusetts
Funding: $778.5M (Secondary Market)
What they do: Earlier this year, Boston-based Klaviyo raised eyebrows with a $320M funding round that values their ESP (email service provider) and marketing automation business at a cool $9B. Companies ranging from small-medium business to enterprise-level e-commerce retailers are choosing Klaviyo for their easy-to-use platform, numerous integrations, and innovative email marketing technology.
Up and coming brands like Catbird, Nomad, and Living Proof are among their rapidly growing customer base.
5. ActiveCampaign
5-year search growth: 68%
Search growth status: Regular
Year founded: 2003
Location: Chicago, Illinois
Funding: $360M (Series C)
What they do: With over 150K customers in 170 countries, ActiveCampaign’s impressive rise comes down to its innovative customer experience software. ActiveCampaign functions as a CRM but also an integrated marketing automation platform, housing data like a traditional CRM while providing active insights and recommendations for marketing teams.
6. Brightedge
5-year search growth: 400%
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2007
Location: Foster City, California
Funding: $61.9M (Series D)
What they do: Brightedge is a specialty platform built for SEO marketers, giving them a singular home for keyword research, rankings, and recommendations in real-time. Brightedge’s 1500+ customers include 57 of the Fortune 100, including names like Nike, Microsoft, and 3M.
7. Prizeout
5-year search growth: 0%
Search growth status: Peaked
Year founded: 2019
Location: New York, New York
Funding: $37.5M (Series B)
What they do: Prizeout helps retailers large and small win customers through innovative gift card marketing. Instead of paying for typical metrics like clicks or impressions, users marketing through Prizeout are essentially paying for revenue. Prizeout claims to deliver “sticky users'' who enjoy the perks of getting gift cards for shopping.
Since its inception in 2019, Prizeout’s client base has grown to include household names like Buffalo Wild Wings, Ulta, Lowe’s, and Bed, Bath, and Beyond.
8. Salsify
5-year search growth: -100%
Search growth status: Peaked
Year founded: 2012
Location: Boston, Massachusetts
Funding: $452.6M (Series F)
What they do: More and more shopping is done online (especially in the wake of Covid) and the way products are presented and digital storefronts are maintained has never been more important. Salsify provides a complete Experience Manager software that analyzes inventories, presentation of products, and manages sales on digital storefronts.
Organizing thousands of SKUs and consolidating product information digitally is no easy task, but Salsify is making huge strides with clients like Asics, Coca Cola, GSK, and more. Salsify has even helped legacy companies like Mars consolidate product catalogs and modernize their data.
9. CreatorIQ
5-year search growth: 314%
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2014
Location: Culver City, California
Funding: $80.8M (Series D)
What they do: Influencer Marketing has been one of the hottest marketing channels over the last few years. With the astronomical rise of social media, influencers have an enormous role in driving sales, generating awareness, and building brand loyalty for companies around the world. Very simply, CreatorIQ has built software that connects enterprise names like Disney, H&M, CVS, and Sephora to creators that are perfectly suited to a campaign or new product.
In a marketing niche that was previously hard to measure, CreatorIQ is also laser-focused on analytics for gauging the success of influencers.
10. Iterable
5-year search growth: 79%
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2013
Location: San Francisco, California
Funding: $342.2M (Series E)
What they do: Iterable, one of the most talked about new marketing automation platforms on the market today, just recently crossed $100M in ARR. Iterable’s platform gives marketers the power of one software to execute email, SMS, push, social media marketing and more.
Iterable’s differentiator is its focus on personalization along the customer journey. Their suite of tools and AI are all based on meeting the customer at each unique stage and segmenting with advanced customer data.
11. Productboard
5-year search growth: 322%
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2014
Location: San Francisco, California
Funding: $261.7M (Series D)
What they do: Productboard offers marketing teams a way to align based on the central role of the customer.
Several innovative features allow teams to engage customers throughout the lifecycle of a product, gather feedback about new ideas, and create a repository that houses customer data in one organized location. With over $130M in funding from notable investors including Tiger Global, Productboard is aiming to be the one-stop software for product marketing teams.
12. Swaarm
5-year search growth: -100%
Search growth status: Peaked
Year founded: 2020
Location: Berlin, Germany
Funding: $930K (Seed)
What they do: Tracking performance marketing is a difficult task given the wide variety of channels that exist for marketers today. Swaarm’s award-winning platform (Capterra Best Ease of Use 2021) gives marketers real-time insight and control into how their campaigns are performing. The Swaarm team claims their platform handles over 30 billion events per day for their growing client base.
The long-term vision for Swaarm? Make day-to-day marketing work a cinch. The Berlin-based team recently closed a “seven-figure funding round” earlier this year which will go towards additional product lines, hiring, and growing the footprint of Swaarm.
13. Ceros
5-year search growth: 15%
Search growth status: Regular
Year founded: 2012
Location: New York, New York
Funding: $133.5M (Private Equity)
What they do: Creating incredible digital content usually requires a combined force of marketers, designers, and occasionally even heavy-duty coders to put out work that is both beautiful, and informative. Ceros solves this problem with their no-code cloud-based platform that allows marketers to build stunning product demos, landing pages, sales decks, and everything in between.
14. Adverity
5-year search growth: 175%
Search growth status: Regular
Year founded: 2015
Location: Vienna, Austria
Funding: $166.3M (Series D)
What they do: The bane of a marketer’s existence is having to measure attribution, results, and performance of their array of campaigns and marketing investments on a daily basis. Adverity’s platform integrates and connects all of the various marketing channels and their analytics in one easy-to-navigate place.
Listed as a Gartner Cool Vendor for 2020 and a G2 Leader for Fall 2021, marketers from diverse brands like Cars.com, Ikea, Forbes, and the 76ers are using Adverity to get clarity into their marketing data sets.
15. Reachdesk
5-year search growth: 2300%
Search growth status: Regular
Year founded: 2018
Location: New York, New York
Funding: $49M (Series B)
What they do: Contrary to popular belief, direct mailing and gifting is far from dead. As of 2021, the market size of direct mail still stands at a whopping $7.6B at a time when digital advertising continues to get more and more expensive. Reachdesk’s intuitive platform allows marketers to build in direct mail and gifting into their outreach sequences. Reachdesk can also take care of the gifting with their own personalized “swag”.
Robust tools including rich analytics, ROI measurement, and address confirmation ensure that marketers are getting the full picture of how their direct mail campaigns are performing.
16. Postscript
5-year search growth: 0%
Search growth status: Peaked
Year founded: 2018
Location: San Francisco, CA
Funding: $106.2M (Series C)
What they do: Given Shopify’s stunning success and rapid ascension to the gold standard for e-commerce platforms, many businesses have sprung up around serving Shopify-based businesses. Newly named to the Forbes Next Billion-Dollar Startups List, Postscript has gone all-in on developing SMS marketing specifically for integration with Shopify.
A growing list of integrations with other growing startups including Klaviyo, Zapier, and Zendesk means that retailers can ensure they have a streamlined and collaborative tech stack that shares data, instead of keeping it siloed.
Conclusion
The startups highlighted in our list are high flyers that are on the frontlines of innovation in the digital marketing space.
Keep an eye on these exciting startups as they continue to grow their product line and capabilities for the best marketing teams worldwide.