Mayan, a fully remote company that develops best-in-class optimization and automation technology for Amazon sellers, has raised $5 million in Series A funding led by Bright Pixel (former Sonae IM). Mayan previously raised $2 million in seed funding from investors including Y Combinator, Global Founders Capital, Alumni Ventures Group, ESAS Ventures, and Alarko Ventures.
Mayan plans to use the funds to accelerate the development of advertising automations and to launch a self-service advertising platform. This new solution will be less expensive than their standard offering, which includes an expert dedicated account manager. Mayan is also releasing a free analytics and forecasting suite for Amazon sellers looking to improve their overall business performance.
Mayan also plans to use the new funding to accelerate the development of data-driven automations that assist sellers in optimizing their Amazon advertising efforts based on their overall business goals and product economics. Mayan will also start focusing on other seller operations such as inventory and working capital.
Mayan has an immediate impact; customers see a 28% increase in ROAS (Return on Ad-Spend) and a 47% increase in ad-sales in the first three months. Customers typically experience their highest ad-sales month in history within three months of working with Mayan, all while sticking to the same budget. In just over two years of operation, Mayan has helped generate over $80 million in ad sales and over $160 million in total sales through Amazon.
Keyword expansion, campaign creation, competitor targeting campaigns, and inventory informed advertising efforts are some of Mayan’s existing product features that are highlighted to help sellers get back to focusing on other key areas of their business.
The Amazon ecosystem has over 6 million sellers worldwide. Amazon has rapidly expanded its in-platform advertising capabilities to better serve these sellers. From 2018 to 2021, Amazon’s ad spend increased from $7 billion to $31 billion. In comparison, this is 12 the revenue generated by Amazon through AWS and is already larger than YouTube’s ad business.
This growth and new strategy for Amazon has had three effects on sellers: the company is becoming a pay-to-play platform, with 40% of all sales preceded by an advertisement; advertising within Amazon is becoming more complex, as it continues to roll out new advertisement types; and the average cost-per-click will continue to rise.
Mayan is expanding its current product suite by launching a self-serve ads optimization tool for Amazon sellers, as well as an inventory optimization product that will be released in early Q2. To make sound business planning decisions, Amazon sellers must understand what is going on in their business today and accurately project the future across both their topline and bottom line, which ads and inventory have a significant impact on, respectively.
Analytics, inventory, and advertising automations are all part of Mayan’s product suite. Mayan creates forecasts by combining all of the data involved in growing an Amazon business, allowing sellers to gain a better understanding of key areas of their business.
