Case Studies → Venture Building → Takumi

Responding to social trends, we launched our influencer marketing platform in 2015.

Building a leading influencer marketing platform: Takumi

Industry: Marketing
Technology: Advertising, Blogging, Social Media
Location: Europe

Brief

With the rise of social media marketing and influencer marketing, brands were looking to adapt to these new platforms to reach their customers. To leverage these new channels, we built a full stack technology platform in-house which included influencer vetting, campaign management, payments and data/analytics, to support a high value, high margin “managed service” model.

Challenges

The majority of social media influencers who had large audiences often had a rather low, and shallow engagement rates which made collaborating with them a less desirable option for large brands. Smaller influencers, on the other hand, had a smaller but must more engaged audience, however, brands didn’t have the means or tools to engage with lots of smaller influencers on a marketing campaign. We wanted to build the middle layer to enable small influencers to carry out campaigns with big brands.

Outcome

The platform we designed has helped change consumer behaviours with curated networks leading to more personalised advertising and content. We have had over a 1000 clients and run over 2500 campaigns, including ⅓ of the top 100 global brands, all utilizing networks on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat. This has provided paid brand partnership opportunities to thousands of influencers globally every month. Takumi is already becoming the leading global influencer platform with 50+ FTEs and offices in New York, Berlin and London, and is currently on track to be the No.1 Influencer Marketing business in 2021. Takumi has a total funding of £10m (~1b JPY) to date, and is on track for a £150m+ (~21b JPY) exit within 7 years of founding.