An international market leader in brand tracking services, Latana also uses its technology to understand the underlying forces behind the opinions of people worldwide with special initiatives including the Democracy Perception Index, which is the largest annual study on the global perception of democracies.

Since its launch in 2019, as a response to a pressing need for companies to better understand their audiences and brand perception, Latana has been leading the way in the world of brand tracking. Today, Latana is pleased to announce that it has raised a €36m Series B equity round investment round led by Oxx, a specialist growth-stage SaaS investor, with participation from Balderton Capital and Kreos.

General Partner of Oxx, and Latana board member, Mikael Johnsson says, "With digital now dominating marketing spending, performance marketing and other data driven tools and techniques have empowered marketeers to make faster and better decisions. However, companies still spend typically 40-60% of their marketing budget on brand marketing which is still largely driven by gut feel and best efforts. Powered by novel sampling methods and advanced statistical processing techniques Latana is disrupting this paradigm by providing brand marketers with accurate, timely and affordable brand marketing data. This provides for an enormous market opportunity and we're convinced that Nico and the Latana team are in pole position to build a really large company."

Latana CEO, Nico Jaspers, says that the company is on a mission to answer the 'ultimate question' for brands: how does our target audience perceive our brand?

"Great marketers thrive on quantitative tools, whether this is for social media management or ad-spend. For too long, brand marketers have been left behind, and have made decisions on 'gut feeling', rather than data", says Jaspers. "Without data, there's no way to know if campaigns are effective. Brand marketers are left with little idea if they are driving results, or impacting business outcomes. More importantly, companies have no real idea how target audiences perceive their brand.”

“This is our mission. Latana provides a direct channel to consumers that helps brands understand exactly what its key audiences are thinking. With its advanced survey technology, and intuitive data-driven dashboard, Latana provides brand marketers with numbers, and a clear view of campaign success and audience perception."

Latana’s technology was born from Jasper’s previous company, Dalia Research. Along with co-founder Fernando Guillén, Jaspers noticed a shift in human behaviour: more people were easily reachable via their smartphones. They realised that this everyday action for billions of people worldwide could open up consumer insights opportunities that go far beyond traditional methods in terms of range and efficiency.

Today, to ensure wide demographic and geographic coverage, Latana uses mobile optimised surveys to access both a precise and an “opted -in” audience for authentic and representative brand opinions in 100+ countries and 1000s of cities worldwide.

Latana also recently sold part of its original API technology (through Dalia Research) to market research firm PureSpectrum, and is now focusing on scaling its B2B SaaS brand tracking platform. This takes Latana from focusing on both platform API clients and consumer businesses to a solid direction in the B2B SaaS arena servicing consumer companies.

On the heels of this recent funding round, the company has big ambitions for rapid growth. It will scale its marketing and sales operations, grow its consumer-facing product teams, and expand its product offering through R&D. Lantana will also make key Product and Operational leadership hires, in order to further development of its SaaS offering. The company services clients globally, and these growth plans will enable Latana to expand both its product offering, and its core client base from SMBs to larger organisations, which have been traditionally serviced by larger market research firms

“We’re excited to have strong partners on board to scale our software and client base,” said Jaspers. “This investment now enables us to fully focus on developing the next generation of brand analytics and consumer insights.”