Q:chi Marks 25 Years In Business

Q:chi, the software company specialising in marketing operations automation and channel partner incentive programme management, is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year.

Founded in 2001 by CEO Greg Evans, Q:chi has established itself as a trusted partner to some of the world's leading enterprise brands. Over the past quarter of a century, the company has built a reputation for long-standing client relationships, deep domain expertise and a system that connects marketing, finance and procurement around a single source of truth.

The company was born during the dot-com era, when Greg identified a gap in how enterprise organisations managed channel partner marketing spend. The first client, a major global cyber-security company, needed a structured, auditable way to manage marketing development funds that were being tracked through spreadsheets and email. Q:chi built a cloud-based solution before the phrase cloud-based software was widely being used.

That early focus on intuitive, easy-to-use solutions that captured key financial data and delivered auditability through structured approval workflows shaped the company's direction from the outset.

Over the first decade, Q:chi worked with a range of enterprise clients across different sectors, solving various business process problems. Through that period, we spotted common themes: marketing teams were struggling with the same operational challenges. Approval chains were complex and opaque, the finance function struggled to get the data they needed, budget and spend tracking was a problem, and organisations suffered the effects of a lack of visibility and integrations between marketing, finance and procurement.

In the early 2010s, Q:chi took the decision to condense that accumulated knowledge and experience into a product of its own, drawing on its knowledge of marketing processes, workflow automation, approval structures, financial coding and integration with ERP systems. The company endeavoured to build a solution with the marketing function in mind.

Today, Q:chi operates two core platforms:

Q:chi ) Harmoni is a marketing operations automation platform that gives enterprise marketing, finance and procurement teams real-time visibility into campaign planning, budget allocation, spend management and performance reporting.

Q:chi ) Affiniti automates channel partner incentive programmes, covering MDF, co-op funds, rebates, deal registration and claims processing through a single platform with partner self-service, automated workflows and AI-powered fraud detection.

The company has worked with organisations across technology, financial services, payments, automotive, hospitality, FMCG and F&B sectors, with many client relationships spanning well over a decade (and some more than two decades).

Greg Evans, CEO and Founder, commented:

"When I started Q:chi, I wanted to build a company that would last. Having witnessed at first hand the mayhem of the dot-com boom and bust, I wanted Q:chi to be the opposite - one that focused on doing excellent work for its clients, year after year.

Twenty-five years on, I am proud that we have stayed true to that. We have since navigated the financial crisis, the explosion of cloud computing and now we're embracing the AI era. Through all of it, we have kept investing in our platform, our people and the relationships that matter."

He added: "What matters to us most is when an enterprise organisation trusts us with their marketing operations or their channel programmes, and we deliver. The fact that so many of our clients have stayed with us for years is the thing I am most proud of."

Looking ahead, Q:chi is investing in AI-powered capabilities across both Harmoni and Affiniti, building on 25 years of accumulated domain knowledge in marketing operations and channel programme management. The company sees AI as an opportunity to enhance decision-making, automate routine processes and surface insights that would be difficult and laborious to identify manually.