Analytics and customer marketing firm Hansa Customer Equity has raised Rs 30 crores from private equity firm ASK Pravi to fund its next phase of growth. The investment is expected to fuel global expansion plans into key markets where data driven marketing is increasingly gaining attention.

Hansa Customer Equity (HansaCequity) was incubated seven years ago and promoted by the R K Swamy Hansa Group, along with S. Swaminathan, formerly iContract, part of JWT, India, and Ajay Kelkar, formerly CMO of HDFC Bank.

The R K Swamy Hansa Group is amongst the country’s largest marketing services groups, and includes advertising agency R K Swamy BBDO amongst other marketing services companies. HansaCequity provides services in customer strategy, data management, analytics, campaign management, and digital services.

ASK Pravi is a domestic mid-market private equity fund focusing on unlisted companies. This is the fund’s sixth investment.

Ajay Kelkar, COO, HansaCequity noted that by 2017, chief marketing officers (CMOs) are expected to invest more in marketing technology than Chief Information Officers (CIOs). The investment would help bring in cross learnings and global best practices across developed and emerging markets, he said in a statement.

Srinivasan Swamy, Chairman, HansaCequity pointed out that HansaCequity had emerged as India’s largest customer marketing firm. The company is handling more than 500 million one-to-one customer campaigns a year.

"Our platform-as-a-service(PaaS) strategy aims to bring in proprietary product and solutions to enable customer intelligence on demand and drive real-time marketing for our clients. We have benchmarked ourselves against global firms like Merkle, Acxiom, and Harte Hanks and the opportunities are really exciting," Swaminathan noted in the statement.

HansaCequity focuses on CRM, social, mobile, analytics and cloud (SMAC). The size of the overall SMAC industry globally is expected to be $1 trillion by 2020. With increase in big data and social media, the company has said the need for real time, on demand analytics and marketing automation has been gaining attention in company board rooms.