Just being a Shopify brand isn’t enough: you have to leverage all the data from the dozens of apps your brand uses to monitor advertising and marketing, inventory, customer communications, and support and sales for your business to be successful.
Enter polar analysis, which collects data from all of these apps and gives Shopify brands access to their data in one place. Once set up using the one-click approach, brands can create data points and other insights to make better decisions about how to grow their business.
David Dokes and Charbel Seif founded the company in 2020. Dokes previously managed Turo’s growth team and $20 million annual marketing budget, while Seif was a data scientist at Airbnb.
Three years later, the company supports more than 2,200 brands, including Polène, Frankie Shop, Albion Fit and Manière de Voir. Most brands have gross annual sales of less than $1 million.
“Ecommerce brands are underselling and overwhelmed with data. The typical brand on Shopify uses 15 different apps, yet of the 30,000 brands we studied, only 0.1% of their 300,000 employees had existing data,” CEO Dokes told TechCrunch. “We think the market no longer has to choose between retail or e-commerce, but actually go into the channel and sell when it makes sense.”
Polar Analytics’ business metrics layer, which Dokes describes as a “huge dictionary of all the metrics and dimensions of e-commerce,” provides each brand with a so-called “knowledge worker” that aggregates all the different data sources and provides seamless Code business intelligence experience. Users can then ask questions about the data.
Polar Analysis Team. Image Source: polar analysis
The company operates a SaaS model, with customers paying monthly or annually, starting at about $400 per month, to get set up on the platform. Dokes said it takes brands about two days to complete the process, compared with the six to 12 months it previously took and required developers and data experts.
The concept has caught on: the company is working with clients in more than 26 countries (the US, UK, France and Australia being the main markets), and Polar Analytics is growing 300% year-over-year. Over the past 12 months, it processed $11.8 billion in gross merchandise and $1.6 billion in assets.
“It shows that brands on Polar actually make an average of about $4 million or $5 million a year, depending on the number of customers we have,” Dokes said.
Today, Polar Analytics announced a $9 million Series A funding round led by Point Nine, with participation from existing investors, Frst, angel investors and Polar Analytics clients. In total, the company has raised $10.5 million.
Dokes intends to use the funds to hire engineers and product designers to expand his 30-person team, doubling the company’s headcount over the next 18 months. Additionally, the company will expand its integration with Shopify and help brands capture more first-party data in an increasingly cookie-less world.
“We’re on Shopify, and our near-term goal is to dominate the platform and build a very strong footprint and market share,” Doakes said. “Our goal is to have 10,000 merchants, which is 5 times what we are currently doing. This is a major milestone. We also want to expand to every eCommerce CMS so we can work with brands wherever they Where to sell.”
