Wicket Labs adds $1.9m of extra funding

Thursday, March 26th, 2020
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Wicket Labs Announces Further Funding

  • From Madrona Venture Group, Westriver Group, And Others To Accelerate Audience Insights Platform Development
  • Recent Customers Include Acorn TV, Brown Sugar, MHz Choice, Noggin, Yippee, And Urban Movie Channel

SEATTLE — Wicket Labs, an industry-leading provider of audience insights and analytics for the OTT (over-the-top) video industry, today announced further funding from their current investor base. The $1.9M from WestRiver Group, Madrona Venture Group, Divergent Ventures, and angel investors reaffirms their support for the company. The funding will accelerate the enhancement of the leading audience insights platform for media and entertainment companies, the Wicket Scorecard.

The Wicket Scorecard addresses a growing need in the OTT video space. Through the integration and harmonization of a myriad of data sources, video businesses use the platform to increase the audience lifetime value of their subscribers by identifying unique insights that are otherwise difficult to expose. This improves visibility into their customers and guides their decision-making with industry benchmarks for key metrics. The integrated data drives results by improving audience acquisition, service engagement, and reducing churn, which continues to be a challenge for the industry.

To compete effectively in the streaming video market that has media giants entering the game, in addition to thousands of services already available worldwide, these businesses must rely on actionable data insights to guide their decisions,” said Anthony Bontrager, Managing Director at WestRiver Group. “Data is what drives OTT video. It’s no different from many industries. Wicket Labs has built a platform that addresses the issues many media companies are struggling to solve themselves.”

To tackle their major pain points of churn, engagement, and customer acquisition and content licensing, a growing number of video services have chosen to integrate the Wicket Scorecard into their video service technology stacks. Acorn TV, Urban Movie Channel, Brown Sugar from Bounce TV, MHz Networks’ SVOD service, MHz Choice, Nickelodeon’s Noggin, and TBN’s Yippee are recent additions to the Wicket Labs customer list and illustrates the variety of subscription video services the Wicket Scorecard creates results for.

“Industry benchmarks, the Attention Index, and the Customer Happiness Index are unique features in the Wicket Scorecard,” said Angela Cannon, Vice President at UP Faith & Family. “These insights enhance our decision making, enabling us to focus our resources and marketing dollars on the most leveraged activities, creating a healthier subscription video business.”

“We’re extremely pleased with this new investment by our current investors. This next level of funding enables us to continue the expansion of our team and further enhance the Wicket Scorecard,” said Marty Roberts, CEO of Wicket Labs. “We have some exciting updates coming to the product that’s sure to add to our growing list of customers. It’s a really exciting time to see video services using data to improve customer acquisition, viewer engagement, and reduce subscriber churn, leading to a better audience lifetime value.”