Amperity is bolstering its C-suite.
The Seattle startup recently hired Seema Kumar as chief people officer and Megan McDonagh as chief marketing officer.
Kumar was previously vice president of human resources at F5 and a longtime exec at Concur. McDonagh spent more than two decades at Intel and was most recently chief marketing officer at RealWear.
The hires will help Amperity support growth of its customer data platform used by companies to get a handle on who is buying their products.
The startup, founded in 2016, is having a record year for new customer sign-ups, said CEO Barry Padgett.
“The company is in really good shape,” he said.
Padgett took over as CEO earlier this year, following the abrupt departure of ex-CEO and co-founder Kabir Shahani.
Amperity made a small number of layoffs in August but Padgett said the 400-person company is still hiring while many startups trim their workforce amid economic uncertainty.
“With all the layoffs that are happening around us, we’re hoping to onboard some great talent here in the next month or so,” he said.
Padgett said Amperity is seeing effects of the shaky economy. Deals are taking longer and there are more hoops to jump through to get contracts signed.
But Amperity is also getting tailwinds from regulation around personal data control and the deprecation of third-party cookies. Companies are increasingly trying to organize their first-party data, Padgett said. “That’s what we do,” he said. “That’s our bread and butter.”
The broader slowdown in digital advertising is also providing opportunity for Amperity.
“Companies are looking for a more effective way of spending their paid media budgets, how they connect more directly with customers,” Padgett said.
Amperity competes against a bevy of other customer data platforms from companies such as Segment, which was acquired by Twilio; Adobe; Salesforce; Oracle; and other startups such as Lytics.
Padgett, a veteran of Concur and Stripe who joined Amperity in 2020, said the company does not anticipate raising more capital and has a “really nice path to profitability.”
Amperity last raised funding in 2021 when it reached a billion-dollar valuation after reeling in $100 million. Investors include Madrona Venture Group, HighSage Ventures, Tiger Global Management, Declaration Partners, and Madera Technology Partners. Total funding to date is $187 million.
Amperity’s board includes Madrona Managing Director Matt McIlwain; Accolade CEO Raj Singh; former Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson; and singer-songwriter Ciara. Shahani also left the board when he departed the company earlier this year.
Shahani and Amperity co-founder Derek Slager previously started Appature and sold the Seattle-based healthcare marketing company to IMS Health in 2013. Slager remains at Amperity as chief technology officer.