Mutiny Raises $50 Million to Improve AdTech

So talk to us about how Mutiny works, because really what you're doing is improving websites, giving businesses the tools to improve their websites more easily and help turn that into dollars, right?

Absolutely. If you think about the evolution of marketing, Emily, phase one was all about the Mad Men era, right? TV, offline advertising. Phase two, with the internet, we moved into the majority of that spend getting shifted to online platforms. Like Facebook and Google. But the challenge that everyone has, as you mentioned, is that $19 out of every $20 that companies spend on those platforms is essentially being set on fire.

Really? And that's pretty dramatic.

Well, the reason is that typically the buyer will see an ad and then will be taken to a website that's generic that they don't understand and they end up not converting. And so now with the availability of data and AI, we're moving into phase 3, where the focus is all about how do we take all this money that we're giving to the Facebooks and Googles of the world and actually turn that into revenue for the company? And that's the problem that Mutiny solves.

How?

So we essentially plug into the customer's data and website, and then we use AI to create thousands of different versions of their website for their different buyers.

And how do you choose the right one of those thousands?

Well, there's a lot of technology that goes into it. And, you know, one of the things that's made Mutiny very successful is that it was inspired by my own experience prior to Mutiny. I led marketing at Gusto and we had the same waste problem and we decided to build a big engineering team to solve this. And that's in fact what all of the biggest tech companies, the Ubers and the Airbnbs of the world, are doing. Hiring hundreds of engineers and data scientists to basically solve this problem. And so what— after doing it ourselves, we realized that every company needs this, but that in order for them to do this, it's virtually impossible to hire all those engineers. So we built Mutiny, which is essentially your own growth engineering team in a box that companies can deploy to, to drive all of these savings and conversions.

So are you saying if I go to a website like J.Crew, which I've gone to many times, but still doesn't seem to know that much about me, it would be more personalized for me thanks to your technology.

Absolutely. If they were using Mutiny, they would be able to show you content that was much more personalized to you specifically.

So talk to us about your customers. Who are they? How many? What's the vision?

Absolutely. So 50 million people have seen a website personalized by Mutiny. We're behind some of the fastest growing companies in the world, such as Snowflake, Notion, Dropbox. And, you know, to give you an example, Notion in just 3 months was able to increase their conversions, which means reduce their cost of advertising by 60%. And so we're seeing some incredible results and market momentum.

So, you know, it's a really interesting time to be talking about this because, you know, we've been talking about big tech earnings results, advertising-driven companies. So, for example, Snap just reported and the results were not that great. You know, is that because companies are moving their ad dollars away from Snap and Facebook and Google and into, you know, other ways to make money? Or is that because advertisers aren't spending money right now?

You know, I mean, I think historically companies have not had many levers outside of spending money on advertising in order to grow their revenue. So we're definitely big proponents that companies need to start shifting some of that spend towards technologically enabling their own properties and their own websites so that when they get the handoff and those visitors end up coming to their website interested to buy their product, they're able to give them a really great experience and actually convert them into revenue.

So you just raised another round, $50 million led by Tiger Global. Talk to us about what you'll do with the money and what's next?

Absolutely. You know, we started with the website. Our vision is to expand and be able to personalize all of the different customer touchpoints. And we're excited to use this funding to grow our team and expand our product. And, you know, I believe that every company in the world can use our technology. So we're excited to go on that expansion journey.