Jungle Scout Adds Support for Amazon Advertising With $110 Million in Growth Capital

Amazon platform Jungle Scout has raised $110 million to expand to additional online marketplaces for the first time in its six-year history—as well as to buy Amazon ad-tech company Downstream Impact to give it a foothold in Amazon Advertising. Led by growth equity firm Summit Partners and Jungle Scout CEO Greg Mercer, it follows an undisclosed round in 2018 in which Summit Partners also participated. According to Mercer, Jungle Scout plans to use the proceeds to launch support for Walmart’s third-party marketplace “within the next two months.” “Right now, we support most of the Amazon marketplaces, but there's a few other ones that we don't,” he added. “We will be releasing support for Walmart in the very near future and then if all goes to plan later on this year, we'd like to expand to some more marketplaces as well.” The company will also use the capital to build out its data collection and analysis. Today, Jungle Scout processes data on more than 500 million Amazon products to offer insights into sales, keywords and trends. Now, however, Downstream will help Jungle Scout optimize brands’ Amazon Advertising campaigns, too. Founded in 2017 by two former Amazon employees, Downstream manages more than $250 million a year in Amazon ad spend for brands including HP and Bic. “Advertising on Amazon has become more and more popular … it's kind of required in order to succeed, and all of our customers were telling us, ‘Man, you have everything that we need, except there's this one missing piece of the puzzle, which is Amazon Advertising,’” Mercer said. “So that's when we started to set our sights towards an acquisition because it felt like there was already a handful of pretty good solutions out there on the market.” In addition, per Jungle Scout’s figures, Amazon Advertising brought in nearly $21.5 billion in revenue in 2020, marking a 66% year-over-year increase. What’s more, a Jungle Scout study of 5000 Amazon sellers found 75% use at least one form of Amazon advertising. Mercer noted Jungle Scout is interested in additional acquisitions, but did not disclose further details. Finally, Jungle Scout plans to invest in its product and data science teams. In fact, Jungle Scout plans to double its headcount from 200 to 400 this year. That includes two offices in China. The first opened two years ago in Shenzhen to cater to Chinese sellers. “We did it as a little bit of a test because we saw the rising number of Chinese residents selling on Amazon,” he said. “I would say it's gone better than expected.” Indeed, Jungle Scout followed with offices in Hangzhou and Qingdao. “It started out as just marketing and sales and local language,” Mercer said. “It has expanded now so there's customer support teams and then there's also now product teams building features and functionality specifically for the Chinese audience.”