Digital media start-up Sokrati raises Series B funding from IvyCap Ventures

Sokrati, the leading Indian digital media spend management platform recently announced that it has raised Series B round of funding from IvyCap Ventures. Existing investor Inventus Capital also participated in the round. The funding is primarily for aggressively growing its sales and marketing efforts both within India, as well as for expanding to the US.

Set up in 2009 by three ex-Amazon colleagues, the company has built a proprietary technology-driven marketing platform that leverages user psychographics and cross-channel intelligence to drive performance efficiencies for digital marketers and, now, handles a sizeable market share of the total digital marketing spend of e-Commerce businesses in India. The company is now well poised to aggressively grow sales in the SME market in India, as well as increase traction in the US market.

Speaking on the occasion of the announcement, Ashish Mehta, Founder and CEO of Sokrati said, “We are very excited to partner with IvyCap in our pursuit to democratize marketing automation & analytics globally. 3,000+ marketers today leverage Sokrati's multi-channel digital marketing platform; by serving over 75m+ ads on a daily basis. Sokrati aims at disrupting the $130 billion digital marketing industry by building an AI driven marketing automation platform.”

“Today, the industry is extremely complicated for the marketers given the fragmented channel specific offering and their decoupled nature from Marketers goals & user dynamics. Sokrati's platform is driven by self-learning algorithms around industry intelligence and then it moulds itself to meet Marketer specific goals. Only the very few large advertisers have something that resembles this today; and we want to level the playing field by making this technology accessible to thousands of marketers globally,” Mehta said further.

He added, “This fresh round of funding will allow us to aggressively expand our technology & big data engineering teams; while building out our marketing presence globally. Beyond the funds, we are also very keen on leveraging IvyCap's unique Mentor Network Program to help achieve our ambitions of building a world-class technology company made out of India.”

Sharing his views, Vikram Gupta, Founder and Managing Partner, IvyCap Ventures said, “We are clearly in the midst of a massive shift in the advertising industry, where marketing dollars are increasingly being channeled to digital media. This is true not only of internet focused business who harness digital media for performance oriented advertising, but even offline businesses, that are increasingly looking towards digital media for brand building and customer engagement.”

“There is a definite need for a one-stop platform that consolidates the major digital channels and offers a media spend optimizing solution out-of-the-box, especially for business that do not have the expertise for performance oriented digital spends, or the need or budget for in-house teams. In addition, we are also looking forward to adding significant value to Sokrati through our network of the Alumni of IITs and the IIMs,” Gupta added further.

“Since Inventus’ investment in 2011, Sokrati has shown phenomenal growth, with a blue chip client base in India and overseas. This funding round will help the company move to the next level. We’re very pleased to have IvyCap leading Series B in Sokrati,” said Samir Kumar, MD, Inventus Advisory Services.

Ashish Wadhwani, Managing Partner, IvyCap will shortly be joining the board of Sokrati on behalf of IvyCap Ventures.