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As the online world slowly moves towards a more privacy-centric and cookie-free environment, startups are creating alternative ways to help businesses manage customer identity and build marketing around what they’re receiving. Attention. Zeotap, a customer identity platform built from the company’s own (own) data that combines this with other data sources to create more complete images of users and what they do, announces today that it has raised another 18.5 millions of dollars.
This is an extension of a Series C round for the company that comes from a single investor, SignalFire, of its Breakout Fund, reserved for growth stage investments. Founded in Berlin with operations now in New York, Bengaluru in India and the UK, Zeotap has raised $ 60.5 million for the round, with other investors including SingTel (through Innov8), Here (the map company) , Iris Capital. , the European Investment Bank and other participants.
Zeotap is not disclosing its valuation, but PitchBook notes that it was close to $ 158 million after the money at the first close.
Zeotap initially started life as a platform for the use of mobile devices, specifically to help operators negotiate deals with third parties who wanted their customers’ data. Over the years, this has expanded and evolved into a greater opportunity not only to exchange data, but also a place to bring it all together to create more useful customer profiles.
Projjol Banerjea, founder and CPO of Zeotap, said in an interview that the opportunity Zeotap is targeting has become especially urgent this year in the wake of the global health pandemic.
Opportunity to reevaluate marketing and drive efficiencies, and redouble your business optimization. And the ones that are more resilient and seeing the present moment as an opportunity to scale. Whatever category you are in, customer data matters. “” Data-reactid = “28”> “You have two companies right now,” he said. “Those who are using the current market as aOpportunity to reevaluate marketing and drive efficiency, and redouble your business optimization. And those who are more resilient and seeing the present moment as an opportunity to scale. Whatever category you are in, customer data matters. “
The company is currently active in 14 markets, he said, with products targeting publishers, brands and data partners. The Zeotap platform essentially covers a few key areas. First, a customer data platform built on an organization’s own data about its own customers, which provides a unified view of the customer for an organization based on what it already has. “This is much more difficult than you might expect,” Banerjea said. “Managing consent is the most important thing here, while making the most of the source assets.”
Second comes the identification resolution. Zeotap claims that it hosts the world’s largest marketing identity graphic, with a “network of identifiers that can locate a customer through different channels.” This can include offline phone numbers, email and home addresses, along with browsing activity. “We can provide a bridge to the digital world for offline names,” he said, adding that Zeotap works with some 112 vendors to bundle data into a single, unified view of the customer.
These then come together into Zeotap’s universal ID + product, which it said is “fully consent-based and tokenized, with no data leakage.” Basically, this is being sold to clients whose marketers can help their efforts to “navigate the ecosystem without any exposure to the client, but also to any of our partners.”
Many of the regulations that have emerged, and the reasons cookies are depreciating, are to provide better protection to consumers, to provide them with greater transparency about how and where their data is used. Approaches like Zeotap’s may not completely eradicate that bigger problem, and some might argue that for the foreseeable future, advertising and marketing will remain a cornerstone of how the web works, just as much as creating a system that does marketing and communication. Big data profiling. that sustains it, safer, explained Banerjea.
“ID + is designed so that we can connect the dots without exposure,” he said.“data-reactid =” 33 “>“ID + is designed so that we can connect the dots without exposure,” he said.
Zeotap has essentially two types of competitors at the moment, he said. Larger marketing clouds that have grown from acquisitions, where a number of activities are in silos but under a larger umbrella; and those who have built big businesses around customer identity management, such as Liveramp (the company formerly known as Acxiom) and The Trade Desk.
But in a $ 87 billion industry, and at a time when having an online strategy is a life and death imperative, there may be room for another.
“COVID-19 has catalyzed a transformation in the marketing mix as brands invest in their data and learnings to redirect traditional television budgets to more effective channels,” said Chris Scoggins, SignalFire’s venture partner, in a statement. . “Our investment in Zeotap is testament to our belief in the company’s rapidly evolving leadership, vision and customer intelligence platform (CIP) with an embedded identity solution for the future of marketing called ID +.”
