Unveiling our investment in mimbi: Empowering Brands in the Retail Media Revolution

We are happy to share our participation in mimbi’s pre-seed funding round of €1.5 million, alongside our esteemed partners from Founders Future, Kima Ventures, and Better Angle. We are also honored to stand alongside prominent angel investors in the sector, such as Emmanuel Grenier (former CEO of CDiscount), the co-founders of Dataimpact, and 11 other retail experts who will bring a wealth of experience to the table.

This is a great opportunity for us to delve into our investment thesis and share insights about the booming retail media market.

A brief overview

In case you don’t know, Retail Media refers to the advertising, promotional, and stock management activities that take place within the online retail environment.

It involves brands (Danone, L’Oréal, Pierre Hermé) and retailers (Amazon, Monoprix, Walmart) collaborating to create targeted campaigns that reach consumers while they are shopping. This form of advertising helps brands effectively engage with their target audience at the point of purchase, influencing consumer decisions and driving sales.

To put it in perspective, Amazon’s retail media activities alone raked in a massive $31 billion in revenue in 2021 (see below an example).

Although Amazon and mass retailers currently dominates 2/3 of the retail media market (thanks to seizing the opportunity early on), the real action is happening within the remaining 1/3 that is set to experience rapid growth in the coming years.

This growth can be attributed to the overall awareness among various retailers in the industry about the new era of digital advertising.

A new era in digital ads…

In the digital advertising landscape, the 2000s marked the search era (Google), followed by the rise of social media in the 2010s (Meta). Now, in the 2020s, advertising on retail networks is the new growth frontier. Google dominated search, Meta ruled social, and retail marketplaces like Alibaba and Amazon are becoming dominant players in retail media.

Historically (comparing to search & social networks) retail is a fragmented, complex market with tens of thousands of retailers sites, relatively few of which command especially high traffic. Brands were not really enthusiastic about it. Retailers didn’t really want to monetize their data. The market seemed niche, and budgets were not allocated to this particular type of network. But recently, key drivers propelled the exponential growth of the retail media market:

1. The pandemic effect: More and more consumers spending online on the retailers websites making digital advertising more attractive to buyers. More online shopping means more eyes on eCommerce sites. Amazon, which operates the biggest retail media network in the West, saw its advertising revenues boom by 32% in 2021. These websites create a “buyer mode” environment for consumers, presenting the perfect opportunity to showcase your product to the right person at the right time.
2. The Death of third-party cookies: Retail media platforms leverage first-party data and closed-loop attribution to deliver targeted ads within a retail environment, providing a privacy-compliant solution for advertisers. With the disappearance of cookies, Retail Media Network will soon become the most powerful way to target consumers.
3. Retailers Awareness: In the past, retailers were hesitant to share their data with brands. They were more incline to keep their data close, and acted like black box for brands. But witnessing the success of Amazon’s retail media activities ($31B of revenues, high-profit margins — 70% to 90%), retailers have become aware of the opportunity and are now seeking ways to monetize their data providing the data supply needed for brands to target their customers on the internet.

The market dynamics in the retail media sector are leading to an increasing fragmentation of data. Major retailers are building ad-selling businesses to compete with Amazon. This is because each marketplace/retailer wants to implement its own retail media strategy, enabling brands to have numerous touchpoints with their customers and track their behavior without obtaining their explicit consent. Still, data fragmentation is a nightmare for brands.

… with major pain points going unresolved

In this bustling marketplace-like environment (where retailers = supply & brands = demand), brands seek advertising spaces and consumer data, while retailers provide first-party data at scale.

Intense competition among first-party data providers like Criteo and CitrusAd is prevalent to establish deep connections with retailers, and the market on the supply side is quite crowded. On the demand side, the market is much more fragmented and analyzing retail media investments poses unique challenges for brands (unlike search and social media platforms):

• Lack of standardization: Unlike search or social media, where data is typically focused on a few platforms and standardization may not be as critical, the retail media landscape is highly fragmented. Retailers using different ad formats and inconsistent measurement metrics create challenges for brands in maintaining visual identity and tracking campaign performance.
• Disjointed Performance: Marketers’ eagerness to target audiences on multiple Retail Media Networks leads to fragmented budgets and inconsistent performance reporting. For example, allocating funds to five different RMNs spreads resources thin and makes it challenging to optimize results.

For now, most retail media analytics & recommandation solutions are American as Amazon was the first player to democratize this practice.

So these are quite good on Amazon Ads / Stocks optimization. But the American market is distinct from the rest of the world, and relatively simpler due to higher standardization: 1) it is dominated by few major players on the retailer part, Amazon, Target and Walmart, and 2) it operates differently without the presence of independent warehouses (hence less complexity).

Retail Media is one of the rare market where European solutions surpass their American counterparts in terms of performance, as reported by brands.

Introducing mimbi, the verticalized Customer Data Platform designed for Retail Media Networks

Mickael and Frédéric spearheaded this digital transformation while running Lengow. With Lengow, they enabled businesses to optimize their e-commerce performance by simplifying and automating the management and distribution of product catalogs across various online channels.

Scaling the company to 150+ employees, 1600 channels and 4,900 brands in 64 countries, they intimately understood brands’ frustrations in maximizing ROI on retail media networks.

They forged strong connections with retailers and agencies to address this pain point effectively with their next venture.

So what is the solution ?

Recognizing the lack of granularity provided by existing solutions, they decided to address this issue by focusing on the demand side. They worked closely with retailers and first-party data providers (supply side) to achieve this goal and created mimbi, a SaaS platform agregating data to help brands and agencies gather, analyze, and share retail media datas effectively:

• Data collection (Pre-decision): Enables brands to store and consolidate data from various retailers, retail media technologies, and even retail and e-commerce sources. As of now, mimbi collects data from 55 connectors.
• Unified Analytics (Decisions enabler): Harmonizes and manages data in dashboards, enabling brands to measure analytics from various media sources. With unified analytics and recommendations across retail media platforms, brands can make unbiased data-driven decisions, maximizing insights for impactful results.
• Data sharing (Post-decision): Enables data sharing (data warehouses, BI tools, APIs) to internal division within companies & partners (reports and analysis). Currently, mimbi supports data sharing through 25 connectors.

To create a relevant product, mimbi focuses on three key components:

1. an extensive range of connectors to access diverse data sources (Execution Expertise),
2. robust algorithms that aggregate and analyze data from these connectors (Tech Expertise), and
3. leveraging the expertise of the Mimbi team to identify the most relevant use cases for this data at the job level to provide proper recommandations and analysis (Business Expertise).

In order to understand mimbi’s position in the value chain, let’s analyze key tools used by brands to analyze their retail media investments and how it differenciates itself:

1. Data Providers : Data providers simply supply data. mimbi connects to these data sources and makes the data actionable for their clients.
2. Data Clean Rooms, ETL Tools : mimbi is an end-to-end platform that caters to both business professionals (marketers, eCommerce managers) and data/tech profiles, whereas an horizontal ETL is merely a technological component that allows data professionals to work with data.
3. Analytics Tool / BI : Generic analytics and BI tools could potentially address the same questions as mimbi, but it would require a dedicated team of data scientists and data engineers to prepare the data, build connectors, develop algorithms, and create business use cases. With mimbi, it’s plug and play. These horizontal tools can handle any use case but at the cost of significant efforts and integrations.

In this market, bringing actionable data to the job level (eCommerce managers, Marketers, Supply Chain Managers…) is crucial. Despite investing several millions of dollars annually in Retail Media Networks, major brands often lack a comprehensive understanding of the effectiveness of their investments. One key component in achieving retail media campaign optimization at the job level: mastering data fragmentation.

Our convictions

The market is nascent, known to marketers but not to the wider tech industry. Our primary belief stems from the substantial growth potential of the 20% market share not dominated by Amazon. Retailers will likely form alliances and consolidate to create compelling retail media offerings. With this belief in mind, here are the key convictions that have led us to place our bet on mimbi’s analytical tool as the future leader in this category:

• High incentive to pay: The pain is massive. In 2022, 33% of the spend had an iROI < 1x (that’s a $10B optimization opportunity). From Danone to L’Oreal and Nestlé, eCommerce managers and Marketing teams are struggling to find solutions that fit both their needs (as non-technical people) and those of retail marketplaces they want to monitor. Still, these brands are boldly investing tens of millions into Retail Media Networks, recognizing the ROI they can yield. Even a small boost in ROI for substantial investments would provide a strong motivation to pay willingly.
• Verticalization will be key: Only specialized tools like mimbi, equipped with in-depth knowledge of product catalogs and a clear understanding of what benefits brands when it comes to data, can effectively navigate the world of retail media and target directly non-technical people. With huge amounts spent on these networks, brands are all about getting granular insights and real-time recommendations which require a verticalized approach.
• Europe has a clear market advantage: The go-to-market strategy often begins with agencies that require a product capable of swiftly expanding to international locations as their clients are big brands with presence in several countries. That’s precisely why we expect Europe to produce market leaders in this industry. European players will have the advantage of catering to both the American and European markets, while the reverse may not hold true due to a particular challenge (data fragmentation) that is less prevalent in the US.
• Tech Momentum: We believe the democratization of LLM APIs presents a timely opportunity for tools targeting non-technical professionals and complex datasets. Business leaders can now directly interact with their data using natural language interfaces, enabling data-driven decisions without extensive technical expertise, unlocking intelligence, and transforming data utilization, which is crucial for Mimbi’s competitive edge in the market.
• Deep Market understanding from Mickaël and Frédéric: We were impressed by their execution in developing a sophisticated MVP that already established connections with several retailers/first-party data providers — a task that is notoriously challenging. They were able to ship rapidly thanks to a deep knowledge of what brands are truly seeking and how to speak with retailers. The most agile team will win on this market, and it’s almost impossible to truly know were it will land in 5 years. We have confidence in Mickaël and Frédéric’s ability to adapt regardless of the circumstances, as well as their credibility in dealing with brands and agencies.

How we will contribute to mimbi’s journey

At OVNI, we aim to form deep partnerships with the startups we invest in, going beyond financial support. One way we do this is by appointing one of our LPs to represent OVNI within the startup’s board of directors. For our partnership with Mimbi, we are proud to have Emmanuel Grenier, former CEO of CDiscount, as our board member representative. He brings industry experience to help shape mimbi’s strategy.

We are not just passive observers on the board; we align our interests with the startup’s success. Our appointed board member receives a carried interest, tying their success to Mimbi’s growth. This keeps us all working together and fired up to help Mimbi achieve its goals.

Emmanuel, a big thank you for coming on board! We can’t wait to see the magic you bring to Mimbi’s journey towards success.

Mickaël and Frédéric have shown their impressive skills with their first venture, and we’re really excited to see what they will do with this amazing opportunity. Retail media is thriving, and mimbi will be the driving force behind its success.

🎢 Mickaël, Frédéric, floor is yours!