Tealium has raised $15.6M in a series C financing round led by Tenaya Capital. Battery Ventures and Presidio Ventures also participated in the round for the for its tag management company that captures clean data streams for enterprise marketers doing analytics on web sites, mobile sites and mobile apps. Tealium has raised a total of $27.2 million.
Tealium’s single universal tag lets companies manage all their vendor tags, including analytics, advertising, affiliate, PPC search and other online marketing. The system lets marketers manage their vendor tag deployments using a drag-and-drop interface. Customers can add new tags, remove or modify existing tags without requiring additional IT resources.
The company will use the funds to accelerate sales, expand its mobile platform and extend its clean data cloud service. In mobile, Tealium will provide support for different mobile architectures and operating systems. Tealium DataCloud will extend to capture more data from email marketers and other vendors. The cloud service collects the data, segments it and makes it available for export that marketers use to do analysis. Lunsford said Tealium has gone from 5 to 250 customers in the past two years, showing how the universal tag is becoming the most valuable piece of data on the web site.
Tealium’s team have a history in data tracking that dates back to the late 1990s when they worked with Webside Story, developing the first JavaScript tags to make it easier to look at website data as opposed to the standard log files.
The practice became popular and soon companies had an assortment of tags that became a giant hairball to untangle. Tag management has emerged as a way to codify the JavaScript tags, making it easier for companies to manage the data.
Tealium CEO Jeff Lunsford said the whole industry has reached a pain point that tag management helps solve, providing a clean source of data from a company’s various vendors.
The tag management market is still relatively young. Lunsford compared it to the web analytics market in 2002 which now is a $1.3 billion market. The vendors in the tag management market have a combined revenue of $70 to $80 million and the market is growing faster than the analytics market did in its early days.