Second Measure, a technology company that analyzes billions of everyday purchases to answer real-time questions about consumer behavior, has closed $20 million in a Series A funding round. Co-led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Goldman Sachs, and joined by Citi Ventures, the funding will be used to support Second Measure’s continued product innovation, rapid growth, and expansion of its technical team.
“What sets Second Measure apart is its platform’s ability to support real-time, ad-hoc queries with high accuracy and massive scale,” said Luis Valdich, managing director and venture investing lead at Citi Ventures. “This unlocks new and powerful use cases for corporates and private equity investors that go beyond the traditional use cases for transactional spend data among public market investors.”
Second Measure has built a self-service platform that helps clients identify fast-growing companies, benchmark competitors, and better understand consumer behavior. The world's best-known financial firms and corporate brands — from Greylock Partners and Neuberger Berman to Domino's and Spotify — rely upon Second Measure to make faster and better decisions. Even media outlets as far-ranging as Bloomberg, CNBC, Recode, and Wall Street Journal trust Second Measure for the most up-to-date information that enriches their reporting and analysis. Examples of Second Measure research results can be found at Data Points.
“We’ve been Second Measure users for years and would be at a loss to understand the modern consumer without it,” said Kent Bennett, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. “It’s crazy to me that anyone manages a consumer-facing business without this ground-truth information. We’re thrilled to join the ride as this team of data geniuses works to arm the rest of the world with insight on the consumer.”
With this new round of financing, the company has received $25.5 million in total funding. Previous investors include Jefferies Financial Group, Norwest Venture Partners, Shasta Ventures, Foundation Capital, Y Combinator, and other top funds and angels.
Second Measure makes it simple to quickly answer real-time questions about how companies are performing and where consumers are spending. With traditional market research, most data collected and analyzed is outdated even before release. Similarly, traditional investment research depends on infrequently updated financial information. Second Measure dramatically improves upon these traditional processes by providing real-time access to consumer spending data, analyzing billions of anonymized purchases to provide a clear and accurate view into the performance of thousands of private and public companies.
“Second Measure’s data platform makes real-time information about consumer spending and business performance accessible in a new way, allowing customers to look at the data in a manner that is most relevant to them,” said Darren Cohen, managing director of Principal Strategic Investments, Goldman Sachs.
Using Second Measure’s self-service platform, investors can identify fast-growing companies, validate investment theses, and track company performance intra-quarter. Consumer brands can benchmark themselves against their competitors, dive into regional performance, and develop rich buyer personas based on spending behavior — all with a daily view powered by direct observation of millions of U.S. consumers.
Founded in 2015, Second Measure traces its roots back to video games. Michael Babineau and Lillian Chou (named to Forbes’ 2019 “30 Under 30”) met at Electronic Arts while building large-scale infrastructure and tooling to help their colleagues understand player behavior. With the growing availability of massive, longitudinal datasets, Babineau and Chou recognized an opportunity to apply these same techniques to solve the problem of making consumer transaction data useful and actionable.
