Skift Take
Sometimes it's the small financing deals that reveal cutting-edge trends in investment and technological opportunity. Curacity must hope that's true of this funding, given that its progress to date has been a slow burn in a promising sector.
The Philadelphia department store magnate John Wanamaker said that half his advertising was wasted — but he wasn't sure which half. A century later, luxury hotels face a similar problem.
Travel magazines, social platforms like Instagram and Pinterest, newspaper websites, TV, and other mediums often display photos of plush guest rooms and gleaming, turquoise swimming pools either as advertisements or journalistic work. But hoteliers can't be sure which content tipped a customer from being "a looker" into being "a booker."
Rising to the challenge, several companies are attempting to help luxury hoteliers crack the puzzle of measuring so-called "downstream attribution."
Exhibit A is Curacity, a New York-based data analytics company that launched in 2015.
This week, Curacity said it had topped up its seed financing with an additional $1 million led by Revel Partners, with participation from angel investor Asaf Evenhaim, CEO of Crossix. The company previously raised $2.3 million in equity financing, plus a contribution from the CEO, to bring the total for the seed round to $4 million.
The smallness of the financing and the smallness of the company, which has only nine full-time employees, underlines that offline attribution is a hard problem to solve.
But the promise of identifying what ty
