sweetiq

Montreal's SweetIQ has raised a $4.2 million Series A round of fundraising to help fuel the growth of its marketing automation platform, led by Plaza Ventures, with an assist from Rothenburg Ventures, Desjardins-Innovatech, Ottimo Retail Group, and Real Ventures, who had previously participated in the company's initial seed round. Founded in 2010, SweetIQ's platform helps to bolster retailers' real-life foot traffic by enabling consumers to find their brick-and-mortar locations while also building local campaigns around their physical stores. “When we started our business, the local marketing space was dominated by cookie-cutter solutions that focused predominantly on basic listings management, while providing little to no analytics,” said SweetIQ co-founder and CEO Mohannad El-Barachi. “Our approach from the outset has been to create products that drive performance for our clients, and are backed by a sophisticated analytics platform. Brands and marketing agencies on both sides of the border are buying into that in a big way. Now, with this latest round of funding, we have the capital we need to continue growing our business, and building out our marketing automation technology.” SweetIQ uses an online-to-offline attribution model to measure the impact that local marketing has on in-store traffic and sales, while also providing digital marketers with tools to generate and execute local marketing campaigns. “We have achieved so much to date, but we’re not stopping there,” added El-Barachi. “Over the course of the next few months, we’re adding a horde of new offline data sources that will further enhance our attribution model, with the goal of not only enabling our clients to better understand foot-traffic generated from local marketing initiatives, but also be able to predict it." For a second consecutive year, SweetIQ has tripled its annual revenues. “Over the course of the last few years, SweetIQ has been quietly building the most comprehensive local marketing platform to address growing market demand for a performance-oriented solution," said Matthew Leibowitz, Partner at Plaza Ventures. "We look forward to working with SweetIQ to support the company’s exponential growth.” Leibowitz will be joining SweetIQ's board of directors. This new funding round, combined with the launch of a new version of its platform, will be aimed at accelerating SweetIQ's growth into the U.S. market, doubling the size of its team, and exploring new partnerships with major directories and offline data providers.