Subscription and content personalization platform Piano raises $88M

Piano, a subscription, analytics, and content personalization platform for businesses, today announced it has raised $88 million in a round of funding from Updata Partners, LinkedIn, and Rittenhouse Ventures.

Founded in 2010, New York-based Piano has historically worked with major publishers and media companies such as the Wall Street Journal, but it also works with companies from other industries, including Kirin, Deutsche Telekom, and IBM’s The Weather Company.

While The Weather Company traditionally made money through advertising and industry partnerships, it recently turned to a subscription revenue model that lets users pay an annual fee to remove ads and receive extra perks, such as more granular data.

Subscriptions are particularly pertinent at a time when third-party ad tracking cookies are on their way out, which is where Piano comes into play.

“Although we’ve historically worked largely with publishers, many of the same concepts apply to non-media businesses — any company creating a digital experience that they hope to monetize could benefit from Piano’s platform,” a spokesperson told VentureBeat. “With the deprecation of third-party cookies, many digital businesses are looking for alternative revenue models to diversify beyond traditional advertising.”

Composed

Piano’s flagship product is Composer, a platform that lets businesses test and manage experiences based on preconfigured rules. Composer ships with various templates and tools that work out of the box, allowing websites to display specific content or calls to action based on time of day and user behavior, among other signals.

Above: Piano: Composer

Personalization is only one part of the puzzle though, as Piano provides subscription management tools spanning paywalls and membership programs and analytics that enable “both macro and micro views of the customer journey.” Powering this is 10 years of benchmark data built internally, supported by integrations with third-party tools such as Google Ad Manager, Adobe Audience, Gigya, Stripe, Apple Pay, and more.

Piano had previously raised around $28 million, and its latest cash injection comes amid a flurry of VC activity across the digital subscriptions space, with ReCharge recently raising $277 million for its subscriptions platform for ecommerce companies and Bold Commerce securing $27 million earlier this year, shortly after Chargebee locked down $55 million.

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