Vertex US co-leads Vividly’s $18M Series A to help CPG brands increase demand more effectively

Imagine a world where advertisers invested trillions of dollars in online advertising, yet they couldn’t easily measure the performance of those dollars. Companies like Google and Facebook wouldn’t have grown into the juggernauts they are today. Why do advertisers flock to Google, Facebook, and increasingly Amazon? Because these companies do two things well: (1) they aggregate demand, and (2) they make it easy to measure the performance of ads.

In the physical world, retailers have been aggregating consumer demand for centuries — consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands spend big dollars to capture the attention of people walking into these retail locations. “Spend” in this context is called trade promotions, which describes marketing activities where third parties execute promotional activities on behalf of brands. Examples include in-store displays, temporary price reductions, coupons, rebates, sampling, bundling, co-advertising, etc.

Brands spend 20% of their revenue — yes, revenue — on trade promotions. Yet, they lack the tools to measure the performance of those dollars and, as a result, make poorly calibrated decisions about future trade investments. Considering the global market for CPG brands is $2.1T, this is a trillion-dollar problem sitting in plain sight.

Enter Vividly: a modern solution to trade performance management (TPM). Vividly helps CPG brands manage every aspect of trade spending from campaign creation to deductions management, promotion measurement, and forecasting. Brands like Bulletproof, Liquid Death, Hint, Vital Farms, and Oatly leverage Vividly to facilitate TPM.

Vertex Ventures US is co-leading Vividly’s $18M Series A alongside 645 Ventures, with participation from existing investors Costanoa Partners and Torch Capital as well as Green Spoon Sales. Alex Whatley started Vividly (f.k.a. Cresicor) at Harvard with his brother, Daniel, and industry veterans Nikki McNeil and Stuart Kennedy. When we met this team, they had grown revenue 4x year-over-year, and it feels like the party is just getting started. Next time you peruse the shelves at your favorite retailer, imagine the technology working behind the scenes to help those brands better reach you as a consumer.