We’re excited to announce that we have raised $20.5 million AUD in Series A funding led by Silicon-Valley based firms Altos Ventures and Footwork.

Uh huh, you read that right. We’re taking Tracksuit to the world and powering the future of brand marketing! This funding marks our second external investment, taking Tracksuit to a valuation of $142.9 million AUD and achieving $9.5 million ARR in just under three years.

Some absolutely legendary investors, Lenny Rachitsky (ex-Airbnb and Founder of Lenny’s Newsletter), Allbirds Co-Founder Tim Brown and frank body Co-Founder Bree Johnson also participated in the round.

We’ll be using the funding to continue to power the best brand tracking solution in the market that delivers unbeatable value for our customers, while supercharging our growth into the US and UK market.

“Our goal with Tracksuit was to improve upon the traditional market research model by making it much easier to understand and way more affordable — reshaping the future of marketing and market research,” Tracksuit’s Co-Founder and Co-CEO Connor Archbold says.

“We’ve built our platform on best-in-class methodology, and this strategic funding further validates our ambition to be the common language to measure, understand, and communicate the value of brand.

“It’s an incredibly exciting time at Tracksuit where we’re moving from experimentation to building and scaling. We’re over the moon to have the support and belief of our incredible investors, as we continue to help the most exciting brands today become the iconic brands of tomorrow.”

“The funding, along with our partnership with the Altos Ventures team, speeds up our plans to democratize brand marketing data and market research,” Tracksuit’s Co-Founder and Co-CEO Matthew Herbert says.

“It underscores the demise of growth-at-all-costs strategies and lifts the importance of full funnel and top-of-funnel marketing. By helping brands know what marketing efforts are working and how to discuss brand health with their teams, Tracksuit is putting them back in control of their brand-building success."

Who’s joining us for the journey

We are incredibly grateful to have the backing of world-class brand builders and experts in scaling companies as we move into our next phase of growth in 2024.

Attracting customers like frank body and Willow and Blake Co-Founder Bree Johnson to come on board as an investor, as well as incredible individuals in the tech industry like Lenny Rachitsky and Allbirds Co-Founder Tim Brown, is testament to Tracksuit’s mission of building the future of brand marketing.

“Across the thousands of startup decks I've looked at, I've almost never seen a growth trajectory like the growth Tracksuit has seen,” Lenny says.

"Understanding brand health was a big driver of strategy at Airbnb (such as what are levels of awareness and consideration by market, compared to competitors, etc). Though I wasn't driving this work, my sense is that the teams would have killed for a tool like this."

"It’s no secret I’m a big fan of Tracksuit,” Bree says. “Having used the technology at frank body and experiencing first hand the impact it had on our business it was a no brainer to invest in their team and their vision. I feel very honoured to come along for the ride and look forward to seeing Tracksuit change the way people view brand and marketing."

We’re also bringing in additional deep expertise and guidance to our board as we focus on expansion into the US and UK in 2024.

Altos’ Anthony Lee will be joining Blackbird General Partner Samantha Wong on Tracksuit’s board, while Footwork’s Co-Founder and General Partner Mike Smith will join as board observer. Mike Smith is the former COO of Walmart.com and Stitch Fix. Marketing legend Mark Ritson also joins the ranks as a formal advisor.

"Our partner Nikhil was lucky enough to invest in Canva in their seed round a decade ago, and since then Tracksuit is the most special culture we've heard about 'down under', Mike says. “The business has exceptional signs of product-market fit — not just as a company based in New Zealand, but compared to others around the world."

Anthony echoes this, saying Altos invests in global companies with the potential for long-term, sustainable growth.

“Tracksuit has created a simple, beautiful solution to a very real problem, and we’ve heard from many customers who love the product. We were impressed by their early traction across four markets, all while being super efficient and maintaining a bootstrapped mindset,” he says.

“We’re excited now to see US companies adopting Tracksuit’s affordable, always-on solution to track the growth of their brands and empower their marketing teams to make data-driven decisions.”

Elevating the marketer back into the driver’s seat

Since Tracksuit’s launch in early 2021, we’ve grown to more than 60 full-time employees and are now tracking over 4000 brands across five geographies: New Zealand, Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada.

Tracksuit’s growth is a direct reflection of marketing becoming more measured and valued worldwide. After a period when many businesses over-indexed into performance marketing during the digital advertising revolution, brand marketing is back. Sustainable brand building is the future, not growth at all costs.

We exist to serve our community of marketers and agencies worldwide by elevating the work they do and proving their impact. If we’re growing, our customers are also growing – it’s a beautiful, reciprocal relationship. Consider our product a love letter to those who have felt undervalued, misunderstood and not properly seen or recognised for their contribution to business growth.

We’re stoked to be the chosen brand tracking solution for more than 400 consumer brands and are lucky enough to count some of the world’s best brand leaders as customers, such as Athletic Brewing Company Chief Marketing Officer Andrew Katz.

“Tracksuit is an invaluable tool for any marketer looking to gauge the effectiveness of their investments. It’s helped us keep a pulse on consumer awareness of Athletic, and understand if what we’re doing is working,” Andrew says.

“Because Tracksuit is ‘always on,’ we can continuously monitor and understand the health of our brand in real time. Its intuitive and user-friendly interface ensures that key stakeholders can readily access and interpret the data.”

Goodman Fielder Senior Insights Manager Kay Bramley says Tracksuit provides her team with real-time tracking, is simple to use and is cost effective.

“Being ‘hands on’ makes our team closer to our brands. The Tracksuit team is very innovative and have been receptive to our suggestions for improvement, while the platform has been optimised based on feedback. It’s made brand health tracking accessible for everyone, and is a tool we can use every day.”

So, what are we building?

There’s a lot on our radar, so we’ll keep this short.

Having access to data is great. But knowing what to do with the data is even better. Our product roadmap is geared towards providing marketers and agencies with actionable insights that make their jobs easier.

We’re building on our existing functionality to:

• Make it easier than ever to understand the key changes in brand health
• Tailor Tracksuit data to support a marketer’s key goals like reporting and strategy setting
• Use Tracksuit’s data across categories to benchmark and know what ‘good’ marketing looks like.

Beyond that, we’re expanding our surveying capabilities to help our customers in the US unlock new levels of regional granularity to support their strategic growth conversations. We’re also planning some next-level integrations so we can serve our data up in the tools marketers and agencies are already using every day.

Join our next stage of growth

Our total funding to date now sits at around $27.9 million AUD with existing investors Blackbird, Icehouse Ventures, Ascential and Shasta Ventures also participating in the series A round.

If you’re interested in joining us on this journey, check out our open roles! If the role you’re looking for isn’t listed, still reach out – we love chatting to talented humans about future opportunities.

We are beyond thrilled to be setting out on our next chapter of growth. A huge thank you to our customers and our investors who are backing our mission to build the future of brand marketing. Onwards!

Source: https://www.gotracksuit.com/