Shopify powers a huge number of e-commerce websites, so it’s no surprise that there are tons of tools around to help these merchants manage all aspects of running their stores. Triple Whale, a Columbus, Ohio-based startup, focuses on providing Shopify store owners with a single platform that brings all of their analytics into one service to help them improve their conversion numbers and gain better insights into their marketing campaigns. Using all this data, the team has now started building smarter AI-based devices.
The company today announced a $25 million Series B round from NFX and Elephant, with strategic participation from Shopify itself. This is on top of the company’s 2022 $24 million Series A round (led by Elephant) and a $2.7 million seed round (led by NFX). To scale this far these days, startups need to be very focused. The group says it has seen 1,400 percent year-over-year growth, with more than 5,000 brands now using its service. The company announced that these brands generated more than $14 billion in sales last year.
Image Credits: Triple Well
Triple Well was co-founded by AJ Orbach (CEO), Ivan Chernick (CTO) and Maxx Blank (COO). Orbach and Bado, who grew up together in the same Jerusalem neighborhood, entered the Shopify ecosystem by running their own brands and stores on the platform, while Chernyk joined as a technical co-founder at Triple Whale. The idea behind Triple Whale was that it took several processes to process their repositories and turn them into production.
“We took the spreadsheets that I used to track my advertising and the overall KPIs that I needed to see, and we took that and made it into a mobile app that a lot of people liked,” Orbach explains. “We took a lot of the influencer playbook we learned at D2C and applied it to the community we found on Twitter—the most influential in the D2C space—and used that playbook to get a lot of traction,” he says.
Right around this time in late 2020, Apple launched iOS 14 and with it new privacy features. This meant that many store owners could no longer rely on the data they got from Facebook, so Triple Well developed a new tagging system for them (dubbed Pixel) which is now live on the platform.
AJ Orbach (CEO), Max Blank (COO) and Ivan Chernyk (CTO)
“The data coming from Facebook was garbled. There was no way to make any sense of it. So we said we need to build a profile. “First of all, our customers are suffering because they don’t have visibility, but if we want to build automation, we need to fix data.”
With Pixel, Triple Whale can provide first-party behavior and real-time data to marketers, but the team is now focused on building a tool based on automation, machine learning and generative AI. Some are quite simple, like the new Rules Engine and ‘AI Timing’ feature that helps marketers automate media buying.
“Based on your information, we will give you the best time to buy during the week and then you can use our rules engine, for example, at night, you can close the ad between 12 and 6. Money,” explained Blank.
Image Credits: Triple Well
Using generative AI, the team plans to soon launch new services that help marketers generate ad copy and images. It will also soon launch a new tool, Lighthouse, which looks for anomalies (perhaps a product is selling faster than usual) and then notifies users and recommends actions that can be taken against it.
According to the founders, the main idea has always been to provide a centralized data platform, with a visualization layer and then automated tools to help users use this data to grow their businesses.
The team told me that most of the brands on the service are bringing in between $1 million and $50 million a year. But now that more big brands are starting to use the service, the team is also starting to look at how to better serve these big customers. The company’s pricing depends on which tools the merchant wants to use, but a full-stack suite sells for $400 a month.
“Triple Whale has built a cutting-edge marketing analytics platform that informs multi-channel merchants with the marketing insights they need in the rapidly evolving online retail landscape,” said Sabrina Fries, Corporate Development Manager at Shopify. “This strategic investment will help top marketers better understand the impact of their marketing spend on growing operations. We look forward to seeing what this team can do!”
