Tracer raises an $18.1m Series A to help businesses make data-driven decisions.

🚀 Weekly Startup Deep Dive: Tracer

📃 Message from the Team

Today we present a data analytics startup who recently raised an $18.1M Series A. Stay tuned as Wednesday you’ll receive an exclusive interview with Jeffrey Nicholson, Tracer’s CEO!

- Team @ DeelScoop

🤝 Data meets business processes

Tracer is a data intelligence platform created to improve businesses' performance. By organizing & classifying through maps, tags and fields, Tracer conglomerates all sources of data from various virtual sensors & technologies like website traffic, advertising data, sales numbers etc, into an holistic view displayed via dashboards, spreadsheets, databases and email alerts. This helps give clients a comprehensive understanding of business performance and assists in identifying blind-spots and improvement areas.

💰️ Who’s funding this?

Tracer raised its Series A co-led by NewRoad Capital Partners, Progress Ventures and BDMI, part of Bertelsmann Investments. S4S Ventures and Arbour Way Investors also participated in the Series A round. At the round’s close, John Sheehy, Operating Partner at NewRoad Capital Partners, was appointed to the Board of Directors.

🤹 Let’s meet the brains behind Tracer

1. Jeffrey Nicholson (Co-Founder & CEO): ex-Chief Media Officer at VaynerMedia

2. Leighton Welch (Co-Founder & CTO): ex-VP of Engineering at VaynerMedia

📈 More on Tracer

Gary Vaynerchuck’s VaynerX & VaynerMedia was the birthplace of Tracer, where it was first used to help the company’s reporting & analytics processes in 2015. Following internal success, the platform was opened to more clients in 2021, with CEO Jeffrey Nicholson decoupling from VaynerMedia to solely focus on building and growing Tracer.

🌱 Growth factors

1. Novel work environments create opportunities for Analytic Platforms (APs) solutions:

The emergence of hybrid and remote work environments have fueled major investments towards APs. Such environments have called on solutions for effective management in a non-physical dialogue. APs help businesses increase their internal & external visibility by more closely measuring inefficiencies and opportunities. This type of awareness is limited to timely capture and prioritization of varying data types within an enterprise.

2. Increased data streams create opportunities for APs to leverage:

Digital transformation is occuring at a pace faster than before. By consequence, an increased amount of data streams have been added to every business - regardless of wether that business is operating in offline or online processes. As these businesses continue to scale, it becomes imperative to track data observations and analytics to maximize the bottom-line over time. APs allow for efficient decision-making backed by evidence to improve efficiencies across operations. The move towards cloud-based environments is also further driving businesses to adopt APs.

🛑 Risks

1. Quality in, quality out: AP solutions are only as accurate as their data inputs.

Data quality is becoming a major liability with APs starting to employ complex and advanced data analysis techniques. AP solutions are growing tremendously fast which is putting greater importance on the certitude of underlying data. It might become difficult to ensure proper checks are being made as data pools and frequencies increase. Advancements in fields like AI, which are now being featured in a lot of AP solutions, are advancing at never-seen-before speeds with many facing catastrophic mistakes because of data quality. Further investments in data’s trust, risk and security management will be required to deploy these APs confidently and securely.

2. Data-literate talent is limited and may slow APs’ growth:

Data analytics is becoming more complex because of its increased streams and varied sensors/technologies, but, at the same time, AP solutions are client-facing with no-code solutions available. As time goes on, it would be important to ensure the human expertise is included in the formula to ensure quality. This requires a talent pool with excellent data expertise - which, as enterprises continue to grow their data analytics department and talent becomes more scarce, may obstruct some companies from pursuing their goals in this field.

💻️ Careers at Tracer: Click here.

No current openings ☹️ 

But! Feel free to send career interests to: [email protected].