Sorrell-backed venture fund takes stake in digital asset manager Tenovos

A venture capital fund backed by the advertising mogul Sir Martin Sorrell will this week unveil its first public investment in a US digital asset management platform.

Sky News understands that S4S Ventures, which was set up this year by Sir Martin and Stanhope Capital Group, are jointly leading a $10m Series B fundraising by Tenovos.

BDMI, a part of the German media conglomerate Bertelsmann’s corporate venture arm, Bertelsmann Investments, is also jointly leading the round.

Based in New York, Tenovos is a software-as-a-service provider founded in 2018 by long-serving industry executives D. Scott Bowen and Sal Hakimi.

The company helps enable brands to streamline and automate the traditional complexities of creating and activating global content, and counts Amazon, the drinks manufacturer Brown-Forman, Marvel and Mattel among its clients.

Tenovos’s recent growth has been accentuated by industry tailwinds as intensifying data and privacy regulation have forced multinational brands to use creative content to generate personalised digital experiences with their customer bases.

Existing investors including Progress Ventures, Revel Partners and Dublin Capital are also understood to have taken part in Tenovos’s new fundraising.

Sir Martin, founder and chairman of S4 Capital and co-founder of S4S Ventures, said: “At S4S Ventures, we believe that intelligence derived from the intersection of content and data is foundational to modern marketing success.

“While many companies are still using DAM [digital asset management] platforms that have neither the data nor insights they need, Tenovos empowers marketers with both to ensure their creative assets can impact engagement, loyalty and revenue.”

Sanja Partalo, co-founder and managing partner of S4S Ventures, added: “All brands need to build a foundation for intelligent content automation at scale.

“Tenovos impressed us with their capabilities in analytics that support data-driven content generation, and its speed of deployment.”

The new funding will be used to accelerate product development and the company’s geographical expansion.

Mr Bowen, Tenovos’s chief executive, said: “Our vision for the future of DAM is to make it a foundational technology within the martech [marketing technology] ecosystem, and the system of record for all content productivity and performance-related data.”