Marketing AI start-up Metigy raises $20m as COVID helps growth

He said Metigy has a great opportunity to be an Australian export success story, with a US office in Denver due to open shortly and Asian operations to be run out of Singapore.

Mr Fairfull founded Metigy (named by combining the name of the Greek goddess of wisdom and thought Metis and the word strategy) alongside its chief technology officer Johnson Lin and former We Are Social technical director Greg Brine. Mr Brine is however no longer actively involved with the business.

It has built up a strong local client base through a partnership with Optus, which resells Metigy to its small business client base of 435,000 in exchange for a 20 per cent revenue share. It also has a reseller agreement in place with Google.

"Google is very good with enterprise customers but they don't typically service an SME very well, and most SMEs don't have the skills to actually use Google that effectively, so it's really an interesting partnership," Mr Fairfull said.

"But there will be 150 million SMEs across south-east Asia by 2022 and 97 per cent of them, according to Google, have no ad technology. So both Google and Facebook, but Google particularly, is out looking for technology providers that can bridge that gap."

Mr Fairfull said raising capital during the pandemic had taken longer than normal, but had ultimately lead to a round that was 100 per cent over-subscribed. He said he decided it was prudent to raise more than initially intended, in order to ensure it had a significant cashflow buffer as it puts the accelerator down on growth plans.

Despite COVID-19 running out of control in the US, he said it remained a very good time for Metigy to be expanding, due to growth opportunities, that have already seen its revenue grow by 300 per cent in the last year.

"I hate to sound grim but COVID has actually been very good for us because digital marketing has never been more critical than it is now," Mr Fairfull said.

"If you were running any sort of offline business then you have to be online now and you have to get really good at it.

"We were growing about 10 per cent each month consistently last year, during COVID it jumped to 16 to 17 per cent, and we have settled down to about 12 per cent per month growth now, which is still pretty solid and is an indication that digital marketing is on everybody's radar."

IPO plans

Lead investor at Cygnet Capital Darien Jagger said his firm had been keen to extend its investment in Metigy after seeing its continued growth, and that it had been important for the round to be made up of all Australian-based investors.

"Strategically, this also places Metigy firmly on the path to remaining Australian based and completing a planned ASX listing,” Mr Jagger said.

Mr Fairfull said an IPO was the eventual plan, which he predicted would occur in about two years.

The over-subscribed funding round meant it was unlikely that the company would need to raise any additional external capital for another couple of years.