Fredrik Skantze, CEO and co-founder of Funnel discusses how marketers can optimize processes and output with the right marketing intelligence in this MarTech catchup:
_________________
Hi Fredrik – thanks for taking the time to be part of the MarTechSeries chat. Tell us about Funnel’s recent funding round – the highs and lows around it.
We secured an $80 million debt facility from HSBC Innovation Banking and Hercules Capital, and for us, this is a huge endorsement of our technology and the future of our marketing intelligence platform. HSBC Innovation Banking have spent years backing the world’s best technology companies, supporting high-growth, venture-backed businesses and their investors, and this additional capital supports Funnel’s strategic initiatives. This includes further global expansion, continued AI-first product development, and operational efficiency improvements as Funnel scales its platform.
We’re approaching profitability, we have a proven business model, we’re growing quickly, and the facility gives us the headroom to keep building. Specifically, we’re looking to accelerate the conversational analytics and agentic measurement capabilities that marketers urgently need as they navigate the post-cookie landscape and demand better visibility into campaign performance across every channel.
Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview with Omri Shtayer, Vice President of Data Products and DaaS at Similarweb
How is Funnel redefining the scope of modern marketing intelligence?
When we started Funnel in 2014, there were around 1,000 marketing products in the world. Today, there are 13,000, with 3,000 launched in the last year alone. The data complexity marketers face has exploded, and most tools weren’t built for it. Cloud data warehouses and BI tools were designed for IT teams, not for marketers who need to act quickly and can’t wait for a technical team to run queries. At Funnel, we built something different: a platform that automatically collects, models, and surfaces marketing data across 700-plus connectors, so marketers can understand what’s working without needing a data scientist in the room.
We then acquired Adtriba to bring in best-in-class measurement, triangulating marketing mix modelling, multi-touch attribution, and incrementality testing into one unified platform. It is one thing to offer clients data and information about their marketing spend; it is quite another to give them marketing intelligence, and that’s what we’re building toward.
How can modern marketers make the most of marketing intelligence to course correct in 2026 and beyond? What are they not doing enough of here?
Our joint research with Ravn Research last year told a sobering story that 86% of in-house marketers and 79% of agency marketers can’t determine the impact of each marketing channel on their overall performance. More than two-fifths of in-house marketers say that when they report results, they don’t analyse the “why” or identify the actions they need to take next. Rather than lacking data, marketers are lacking the right foundation for collecting, measuring and actioning it, which means unifying all of your data sources, automating reporting, and committing to consistent measurement.
Many marketers are skipping this step and jumping straight to AI experimentation, which only delivers intelligent insights when the data underneath it is clean and structured. The other blind spot is the shift from SEO to GEO — 64% of marketers expect generative engine optimisation to eclipse traditional SEO within two to three years, yet fewer than half are actually training their teams for it. Marketers must therefore move with the times, adopting marketing intelligence.
Can you highlight some brands from around the world that are fuelling better marketing plans and strategies with improved marketing intelligence?
We work with around 2,600 customers directly and reach another 60,000 global brands through roughly 1,000 media agencies. Brands like Uber, Adidas, ASOS, and Samsung are using Funnel to get a clear, unified view of their marketing spend across every channel. On the agency side, our five-year global partnership with Havas, announced last year, spanning all 40-plus of their offices worldwide, is a good example of how marketing intelligence scales. They use our platform to deliver sharper, more consistent insights across their entire client portfolio.
One particular case showing off marketing intelligence in action comes from Sephora’s European marketing operation. The team had a data problem that will be familiar to many large organisations: every week, the central data team waited for reports to arrive from local markets across Europe, spent an entire working day consolidating them, and only then could it present findings to senior leadership (a slow and exhausting process).
Working with Funnel and data agency Hanalytics, Sephora implemented a stack where marketing data is ingested, cleaned and prepared as one table in Funnel, sent to BigQuery, transformed using dbt, and visualised in Looker Studio. The impact was immediate as the central team got a full working day back each week, and what started as a senior leadership report expanded to include operational reports for local markets too. Everyone from regional teams to the C-suite now works from the same data, and a company that once spent its time gathering information now spends it acting on it.
A few thoughts on the future of B2B SaaS marketing and martech?
Marketing has always been part art, part science; the difference now is that the science is becoming non-negotiable as the platforms marketers have relied on for decades – Google, Meta, TikTok – are increasingly black boxes. AI handles the bidding, optimises the targeting, and generates the creative, leaving marketers with less visibility into what’s actually driving results at the very moment when understanding that has never mattered more. B2B lead generation automated by agents, AI-generated copy and creative at scale are all happening now, and marketers who assume their current measurement approach can keep pace may well be caught out.
What I find genuinely fascinating is how measurement itself is evolving technically. We’re using neural networks that understand the sequence of marketing touchpoints, not just the touchpoints themselves, because whether a branded search came before or after a direct visit completely changes what drove a conversion. The future belongs to organisations that treat measurement as a priority rather than just a way to report to their superiors. If AI is doing more of the marketing, knowing what’s working is one of the only competitive edges that remains entirely yours.
Top martech innovators — people or companies — you’d like to shout out before we wrap up?
It would be the AI-first companies working on a completely new approach to solving marketing’s different problems. There are a lot of them, and many have a really strong and exciting vision of where they want to go. Many of them are not quite there yet, but give it another year or so and another couple of iterations both for them and the foundational models, and I think we will see some very exciting new AI martech companies emerge and reach scale.
One such product that we are trying out ourselves is Day AI, which is an AI-first take on the CRM space. We are currently evaluating how it stacks up against our existing CRM. The vision of what it can be is quite transformative compared to an existing CRM system.
Marketing Technology News: Martech Architecture For Small Language Models: Building Governable AI Systems At Scale
Funnel helps thousands of marketers at brands like Havas Media, Home Depot and Publicis to choreograph their data and unlock insights that move their businesses forward. Connect, explore, visualize, measure and more — all in one place.
About Fredrik Skantze
Fredrik Skantze, is CEO and co-founder of Funnel.