Walkbase, the marketing optimization platform for brick and mortar retailers, today announced it has reached an agreement to raise 3 million euro in Series A funding from SBT Venture Capital and Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, former CEO of Nokia.

Walkbase will invest the funds in strengthening its sales, marketing and customer-insight teams, as well as accelerating its growth strategy to become the leading marketing optimisation platform for omni-channel retail in EMEA and Russia.

Walkbase has developed a platform to measure, understand and optimize the omni-channel customer journey, where smartphone-enabled shoppers jump between online and offline channels while they search, research, and purchase products.

'Even though online buying is steadily growing, 92 percent of retail sales still take place in physical stores,' notes Tuomas Wuoti, CEO & Co-Founder of Walkbase. 'The world of retail is about to enter into the next major disruption after going online. A prime advantage of online has been the ability to accurately measure buyer behavior.

'In online stores, everything can be optimized in real time for the best possible shopping experience. Thanks to new technology, this ability is now spreading to offline retail. It's taking place really fast and Walkbase is leading that disruption.'

Walkbase offers state-of-the-art online/offline campaign analysis and forecasting tools for chief marketing officers who are continuing the digitization of retail marketing budgets. The Walkbase platform makes it easy to integrate new kinds of offline customer behavior data with existing retail business intelligence and marketing automation software. Walkbase's current clients, many of whom are UK-based, include top brands in the fields of automotive retail, banking and fashion retail.

The investment round is being led by SBT Venture Capital, whose principal investor is Sberbank, the largest bank in Russia and Eastern Europe. 'After a thorough analysis of the field at Sberbank, we have selected Walkbase as the most promising platform for marketing optimization in offline retail. In connection, SBT Venture Capital and Walkbase have agreed on the closing of a 3 million euro Series A round of financing,' said Mircea Mihaescu, Partner at SBT Venture Capital. 'In addition to the investment, we plan to adopt this technology at Sberbank across our 18,000 retail branches,' he continued.

Nokia's former CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo will participate in the investment round and join Walkbase's advisory board. 'Walkbase - solving a big problem at the intersection of connected shoppers, retail analytics and personalized shopping experience - is one of the most exciting early-stage companies I have encountered,' Kallasvuo said.

Walkbase is currently evaluating opportunities to start additional pilots with a number of high street retail chains in the UK.