Des Moines fintech startup Denim is now Denim Social after merging with St. Louis-based fintech Gremlin Social, which offers a social media content creation and management platform for financial service firms.
As Denim Social, the company is combining Gremlin Social’s media content creation and Denim’s advertising and marketing automation platform to target regulated financial services companies. Denim Social now serves more than 250 financial services firms, said Gregory Bailey, founder of Denim and president and chief product officer of the new company. Denim Social now has office locations in Des Moines, St. Louis and Birmingham, Ala.
Denim and Gremlin Social entered serious talks late last year, and merged in early 2020 with plans to go live with Denim Social this month. Bailey and Douglas Wilber, now chief executive officer at Denim Social, had been following each other’s companies for two years before discussions started, Bailey said.
“As we got to understand each other’s product capabilities and product offering, we started looking at each other and thinking, Gremlin Social has this fantastic organic content … that they’ve built primarily for banks and other financial service firms. On our side, we have built the paid advertising and marketing automation platform for insurance companies and related financial services firms,” Bailey said. “They fit really powerfully together. If you think about the markets that we serve, we’re really combining and capitalizing on merging a couple of different markets.”
The company recently raised $4 million in a Series A funding round with Hermann Cos. of St. Louis, Wilber said, with intent to hire new staff members in engineering, sales, marketing and customer service.
“We knew it only really made sense to do so if we were going to have a capital partner lined up to hit that gas pedal as fast as we can on building up the technology, sales and marketing functions,” Wilber said.
Denim Social is planning new product updates in social media publishing, analytics, compliance and an update on Denim’s Pages product.
“The way that people have historically purchased many financial services products, their insurance, their retirement planning [or] their mortgages, those conversations typically happen in person,” Wilber said. “That’s all happening digitally. In many ways, our business is actually more in demand over the last [few] weeks than it was prior.”
