Funnel

Overview

Funnel is a powerful data hub that automatically pulls marketing performance data from hundreds of advertising platforms. It cleans, maps, and feeds that data directly into BI tools and dashboards, eliminating the need for marketers to manually download and merge spreadsheets.

Founder story

Per Made and Fredrik Skantze previously built Qwaya, an advertising tool for Facebook. While running it, they realized that marketers were drowning in spreadsheets, spending days manually downloading CSVs from Google, Facebook, and Twitter just to figure out their basic ROI. Seeing that the future of marketing required centralizing data, they founded Funnel in Stockholm in 2014. It quickly became an essential infrastructure layer for modern marketers, earning them recognition as one of Europe's fastest-growing companies.

What it does

• Extracts data from over 500 marketing and advertising platforms
• Cleans, maps, and standardizes messy data automatically
• Feeds live data directly into tools like Google Data Studio and Tableau
• Stores historical marketing performance securely in the cloud
• Provides currency conversion to unify global ad spend metrics.

Who it's for

• Marketing analysts
• Performance marketers
• Data engineers
• Advertising agencies.

Why it works

• Automated ETL: Completely replaces the painful ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) process, freeing up data engineers from building custom API connections
• Massive Connectors: Offers one of the largest libraries of native integrations in the industry, pulling data from obscure ad networks that other tools ignore
• Business-Ready Data: It doesn't just dump raw data; it intelligently groups and standardizes metrics (like unifying 'clicks' across Facebook and TikTok) before exporting
• No-Code Interface: Allows marketers to manipulate and map complex data rules visually, without needing to write SQL
• Platform Agnostic: It acts purely as the data pipeline, allowing teams to export their clean data to whatever visualization tool they already prefer.

Growth strategies

• Positioned themselves perfectly between marketing and IT, solving a massive pain point for both departments simultaneously.
• Raised significant venture capital (over $130M) to aggressively build out their 500+ data connectors, creating an immense competitive moat.
• Targeted massive performance marketing agencies like Bamboo, who managed billions in ad spend and needed desperately to automate their client reporting.
• Captured the European market early before expanding heavily into the US with a dedicated Boston headquarters.

Alternatives

• Supermetrics
• Fivetran
• Improvado
• Adverity

Comparison overview

• Supermetrics: A highly popular tool that focuses heavily on pulling data directly into Google Sheets and Excel, rather than acting as a standalone data warehouse.
• Fivetran: A massive, enterprise-grade data integration tool that pulls data from everywhere (not just marketing) and dumps it into raw data warehouses.
• Improvado: A direct competitor to Funnel that focuses deeply on enterprise marketing data and offers white-glove setup services.
• Adverity: A robust data integration and visualization platform highly favored by massive multinational agencies.
• While Supermetrics is fantastic for simple spreadsheet reporting and Fivetran is built for hardcore data engineers, Funnel owns the marketer-friendly middle ground. It acts as a "no-code" data hub, automatically mapping and cleaning the data before it hits the dashboard, so marketers don't need to know SQL to build complex reports.