After raising capital and being accepted into the Salesforce Marketplace in 2020, St. John’s-based Metricsflow is now lining up beta-testers for its cookieless analytics product.
The company in 2020 raised between $400,000 and $450,000 in equity financing, drawing investment from the Venture NL fund (which is managed by Pelorus Venture Capital) and three angels. With that funding, they were able to secure additional non-dilutive funds bringing the total raise up to more than $900,000.
As business slowed down due to the pandemic, Metricsflow also used the time to refine and enhance its product. It went through the rigorous process of being approved for the Salesforce Marketplace, which means its product can now be sold to companies that use Salesforce as their Customer Relationship Management tool. Its eight employees are also hoping to bring on a group of beta-testers in the first quarter, then look to build on that exercise to produce revenue later in the year.
“Our biggest milestone for this year won’t be in the numbers,” said Co-Founder and CEO Isaac Adejuwon in an interview. “I think our biggest milestone will be to get much more deployment in the U.S. market.”
Coming out of Memorial University of Newfoundland five years ago, Adejuwon and his Co-Founder Bukunola Ladele set out to develop a product that would convert their content-marketing audience into clients. In 2020, Adejuwon said, the company “hit the reset” and came up with a new product.
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This new product lets clients analyze traffic on their website without the use of cookies, which are digital tools that track people’s activity on the internet. The problem is a lot of consumers don’t like cookies, and many will leave a company’s website rather than accept the use of cookies.
That means the data collected from a corporate website is incomplete – in most jurisdictions companies lose about 40 percent of their data because of this problem, and it can be as high as 90 percent in some countries. Metricsflow allows companies to get a more accurate reading of their data, and to do so without having to ask customers to approve cookies.
“The biggest piece for us is we’re able to collect data in a non-invasive way,” said Adejuwon, a native of Nigeria who gained his permanent residency in Canada using the federal government’s Startup Visa program.
Now that it has developed the product, the company has its sights on working with beta-testers in the next few months and is then seeking to increase revenue. If that happens, the senior team will work on raising a seed round later in the year.
“For this year, the first quarter is all about beta customer acquisition, so it’s not about revenue but getting people to try it,” said Chair of the Board Ken Marshall, a retired Rogers executive who invested in the company. “In the latter half of the year, it’s going to be all about customer acquisition. . . . We’ve got to make sure we can appeal to investors with a product that is functional and being used in the market.”