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Candy Crush tycoon invests £3.8m in Shoreditch customer insights firm

Angel investor and early Candy Crush backer, Mel Morris, has personally invested £3.8m in London’s Audisense as the firm looks set to scale its business and expand into North America.

The investment will help to fuel the software-as-a-service (SaaS) developer’s ambitious expansion plans, as it looks to expand its consumer insight and consumer engagement services across the Atlantic.

Since launching in 2011 in Shoreditch, Audisense has grown its headcount to over 50 members of staff across its London and Cordoba, Spain offices, and works with a range of enterprise clients including Premier League clubs and major news publishers.

The business offers big businesses and enterprise clients a suite of customer engagement and analysis tools utilising intelligence gleaned from Twitter, other social sources and by matching email addresses with social media profiles.

It is also one of only two businesses to boast official partner status official partner status with Twitter for Data/Insights and Advertising and utilises IBM Watson’s cognitive computing platform to drive its personality insights service.

Following the significant seven-figure investment, Morris commented: “An estimated $15bn will be spent on social marketing by businesses in the USA alone this year, and delivering more strategic and measurable value to those spending it is going to be key.

“I believe the Audiense team and tech, packed as it is with genuine and deep expertise in socially-acquired data and insight, is superbly poised to help businesses extract maximum value from their social marketing budgets.”

Chief Executive Javier Burón, who founded Audiense with fellow Co-Founder Alfredo Artiles, said: “Four thousand Audiense customers are already enjoying the benefits of our SaaS capabilities, but we’re only just scratching the surface of the market.

“Companies are beginning to understand how vital consumer insights are to their future success or even to their continued existence. Massively positive feedback from our rapidly growing customer base would suggest we have the right solution at exactly the right time.”

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