Announcing our investment in DataHawk

We’re betting on DataHawk to become the global leader in eCommerce analytics and Optimization.

63%. This is the share of US e-commerce sales that went through marketplaces like Amazon and Walmart in 2020. According to Morgan Stanley, the Covid-19 pandemic has pulled forward an estimated 2 years of e-commerce adoption. We’ve collectively turned our attention to 3rd party marketplaces while we were stuck at home, and they delivered, pun intended. Behind these marketplaces, 1.5 million active sellers list products on Amazon, amongst which 25,000+ make over $1M in sales.

Amazon brands, resellers, agencies and aggregators are now looking to generate alpha over their competitors through better operations, and more importantly, a distinct data advantage. This is where DataHawk comes into play. Amazon organic sales and paid ads placements are slowly becoming more competitive and have seen growing saturation caused by a rising amount of advertising dollars being poured into the platform - In Q2 of 2021 alone, Amazon generated $3B in advertising revenue. And this trend is not ready to stop yet. Amazon’s PPC advertising tool is able to offer what paid social channels currently struggle with: Direct attribution (iOS 14 changes), high-intent search, and lower CPMs. For CPG brands, the platform is bound to outperform the likes of Facebook, Snapchat, or Google Ads. Here, we’re seeing comparable market dynamics to Google Search in the early 2010s.

Our latest investment DataHawk is positioned to become the leader in eCommerce analytics for those merchants. Launched in 2018, DataHawk helps emerging to large brands better run their eCommerce operations thanks to a centralized operating system for analytics and optimizations. DataHawk’s eCommerce analytics and optimization software suite currently covers the following services:

• Search Engine Optimization: Increasing organic traffic to products’ listings is the bread and butter of building a profitable eCommerce business. 
• Product Analytics: DataHawk provides a solution for effortless monitoring, timely alerting, and gathering of powerful intel on the smallest changes on product data,
• Market Intelligence: DataHawk has built Market Research and Intelligence capabilities that help brands analyze markets, categories, search queries, and competitors
• Advertising: DataHawk provides a powerful advertising analytics solution to help brands better monitor, analyze, and increase the performance of their ads and increase their return-on-ad-spend.
• Finance: DataHawk provides an accurate overview of financial performance across multiple distribution channels.

As part of our diligence process, we conducted calls with multiple agencies and brands with a strong presence on Amazon. The feedback was unanimous in saying that DataHawk has the best quality of data amongst its competitors, systematically ranking it above incumbents Helium 10 and Jungle Scout. And this is also validated by DataHawk’s impressive client base. Roll-up players predominantly choose DataHawk over other analytics tools for its advanced data collection and visualization capabilities.

Here are some of the companies using DataHawk: 

1. Leading global brands like Ekaterra (the tea division of Unilever)
2. Many of the most prominent Amazon brand aggregators like Unybrands, Boosted Commerce, or Olsam.
3. Multiple leading global agencies like Tinuiti (the largest independent performance marketing firm across the triopoly of Google, Facebook, and Amazon) or GroupM
4. Hundreds of emerging direct-to-consumer brands and resellers on Amazon.

When investing in DataHawk, we not only looked into all the features built and traction generated, but also placed a large emphasis on evaluating the team and its ability to scale the platform. And what we saw internally was very impressive. It’s no hasard that DataHawk’s name contains the word data. The team’s data analytics capabilities and reporting tools show a lot of maturity, and are on par with that of a Series C startup. At the same time, Isaac, Othmane and Sylvain have been able to maintain the agility of a seed project and roll-out features at a lightspeed pace. Since June, they have demonstrated an Incredible capacity to iterate rapidly, with key product launches coming up in the next few months.

And finally, the company’s traction will do the talking better than us: DataHawk grew 300% year-over-year, boasts a team of 35 employees, and processes multiple billions in Gross Merchandise Volume (GMV) from its users and customers.‍

Looking forward:
This financing round will give DataHawk the capacity to hire more than 80 new employees over the next 12 months, add support for additional eCommerce channels, and enhance AI & recommendation capabilities. Additionally, this funding paves the way for a planned US office expansion, as over 60% of DataHawk customers are US-based.

The company plans to expand on its current software capabilities for brands selling goods on Amazon and Walmart. This fresh capital infusion will also help DataHawk increase its multi-channel capabilities by supporting brands on other online distribution channels.

About DataHawk:
Launched in 2018, DataHawk has built a proprietary technology that collects and processes millions of data points daily. This data is then processed, analyzed, and displayed on intuitive dashboards, helping DataHawk users extract exceptional insights on their business performance, benchmark it against the competition, and access recommendations for further improvement. The company had previously raised $1M in Seed financing in 2019.