Polar Analytics raises $9M to scale Shopify brands

It’s not enough to be just a Shopify brand anymore: you have to leverage all the data coming in from the dozens of apps that brands use to monitor advertising and marketing, inventory, customer communications and support and sales, so that your business can succeed.

Enter Polar Analytics, which scoops up the data from all of those apps and provides Shopify brands with access to their data all in one place. After using a one-click method to set it up, brands can create data points and other insights to make better decisions on how to grow their businesses.

David Dokes and Charbel Seif started the company in 2020. Dokes was previously managing Turo’s growth team and a $20 million annual marketing budget, while Seif was formerly a data scientist at Airbnb.

Three years later, the company is supporting more than 2,200 brands, including Polène, the Frankie Shop, Albion Fit and Manière de Voir. Most brands are below $1 million of yearly gross merchandise volume.

“E-commerce brands are undersold and overwhelmed with data. The typical brand on Shopify is using 15 different apps, however, among 30,000 brands we looked at, 0.1% of the 300,000 employees at those brands had data on hand,” CEO Dokes told TechCrunch. “We see the market as you no longer have to choose between retail or e-commerce, but actually going on a channel and selling whenever it makes sense.”

Polar Analytics’ business metrics layer, which Dokes described as “a huge dictionary of all of the metrics and dimensions of e-commerce,” gives each brand a so-called “knowledge worker,” that aggregates all of the different data sources and provides a no-code business intelligence experience. Users can then pose questions about the data.

The company is a SaaS model, and customers pay on a monthly or yearly basis, starting at around $400 per month, to get set up on the platform. Dokes said the process takes about two days for a brand to do this, whereas previously it would have taken six to 12 months and required developers and data experts.

The concept has caught on: The company is working with customers in over 26 countries — the United States, United Kingdom, France and Australia are top markets — and Polar Analytics is growing 300% year over year. It has processed $11.8 billion in gross merchandise volume and 1.6 billion of assets in the last 12 months.

“It shows, on average, based on the number of customers that we have, that brands on Polar actually make about $4 million or $5 million a year,” Dokes said.

Today, Polar Analytics announced a $9 million Series A round of funding, led by Point Nine, that included participation from existing investors, Frst, angel investors and Polar Analytics customers. In total, the company has raised $10.5 million.

Dokes intends to use the funding to hire engineers and product designers to add to his team of 30, expecting to double the company’s headcount in the next 18 months. In addition, the company will expand its integrations with Shopify and to help brands ingest more first-party data in this increasingly cookie-less world.

“We’re on Shopify, and our immediate goal is to dominate this platform and establish a very strong footprint and market share,” Dokes said. “We’re aiming for 10,000 merchants, which is 5x what we’re currently doing. That’s a big milestone. We also want to expand to every e-commerce CMS so we can be with brands wherever they sell.”