Impact – $150 Million Funding at a $1.5 Billion Valuation to Accelerate Global Growth and Power Productive Partnerships
Impact, the leading global partnership management platform supporting more than one million partnerships for more than 1,600 brands, announced $150 million in funding led by Qatar Investment Authority (QIA) and joined by Providence Public. This strategic growth investment brings Impact’s valuation to $1.5 billion, the first partnership management platform provider to reach this milestone. Impact has also surpassed $100 million in annual recurring revenue, solidifying its leadership position in the partnerships category.
Impact’s latest round of funding will enable the company to accelerate its investment in partnership automation innovation, increase channel partnerships, and scale its go to market efforts for brands, agencies, and publishers globally. In turn, this will accelerate growth for all participants in the Partnership Economy. Existing investors in Impact include PSG and Silversmith Capital Partners.
Consumers live in a digital world and have greater control over how they interact with brands. Further, their wariness and annoyance with traditional forms of advertising has continued to grow, with 69% of consumers reporting that they do not trust advertising. This shift has led brands to turn to partnerships to reach consumers in a more meaningful way. Impact is the trusted platform that enables publishers, brands, and agencies to aggregate, orchestrate, and optimise partnerships — affiliate, influencer, commerce content publishers, B2B, and more — in a single, unified platform.
“Brands are searching for new and authentic ways to reach consumers, more so now than ever before as traditionally relied-upon methods of advertising have become increasingly more disrupted and expensive,” says David A. Yovanno, Impact’s CEO. “Partnerships create a path to the modern consumer by establishing a natural connection in the form of trusted information, reviews, and recommendations, and done with the consumer’s experience in mind. Impact has seen impressive growth in productive partnerships by driving this new wave of connection between brands, publishers, and consumers.”
This announcement comes on the heels of Impact’s acquisitions of Affluent, Trackonomics, and Activate in the past 12 months and demonstrates Impact’s commitment to the transformation of the overall partnerships ecosystem. In March of this year, Impact became a Certified App Partner for influencer and affiliate marketing for Shopify Plus, and was subsequently promoted to Shopify’s over 1 million users.
Impact’s impressive client roster, which includes six of the top 10 retailers in the U.S., has grown more than 50% in the past year. Leading brands such as Shopify, Uber and Walmart rely on Impact’s marketplace to discover and recruit new partners, then contract, track, optimize and process payments for those relationships within the platform. With more than 600 employees in 14 offices across nine countries, Impact processed payouts in more than 60 currencies worldwide in fiscal year 2021.
Impact is the global leader in Partnership Automation and catalyst for the new Partnership Economy. Impact accelerates enterprise growth by automating the full partnership life cycle, including discovery, recruitment, contracting, engagement, fraud protection, optimisation, and payment processing for enterprise partnerships. Impact’s Partnership Cloud™ manages more than £50B in e-commerce sales and processes over £2B per year in payments to partners. Impact drives revenue growth for global enterprise brands such as AIRBNB, Adidas, Getty Images, Lenovo, Levi’s, TUI, and Disney+. Founded in Santa Barbara, CA, in 2008, Impact has grown to more than 750 employees worldwide.