zeotap raises €12M Euro Series B Funding For Mobile Data Platform

zeotap today announced its Series B funding round of 12 million euros. The investment reflects zeotap’s achievements in telecom data on-boarding for advertising targeting and measurement. It brings the company’s total funding to more than 20 million euros.

Data is increasingly the cornerstone of the mobile advertising market that accounted for more than 50% of the $200 billion in digital ad investment in 2016 (eMarketer). It determines the efficiency of any buying or selling decision in the programmatic advertising ecosystem, which represents most of the advertising market in the US and is growing quickly around the world.

To demystify the term, programmatic advertising is a technology-driven method of buying or selling digital advertising inventory. It allows publishers and brands to move from manually negotiated, insertion order-led, repetitive workflows to a much more streamlined and efficient process.

“Programmatic advertising hasn’t picked up pace in India yet, especially on mobile, even though consumer eyeballs continue to move to mobile and apps dominate consumer time spent. The fundamental reason is the marked scarcity of trustworthy data for targeting. This leads to imprecise and ineffective campaigns that disappoint buyers and curtail their appetite for programmatic,” said Sandeep Goyal, Chairman of Mogaé Media and industry veteran.

Since its inception in September 2014, zeotap has created a global platform to effectively integrate deterministic data from different telecom operators. Leveraging these telecom assets as a nucleus, zeotap has proven the efficacy and value of its data by achieving up to four times the average data price in the market. Mozeo, zeotap’s Indian joint venture established a few months ago with local partner Mogaé Media, has seen strong progress. “With Mozeo, we’re providing a unique solution that promises to comprehensively improve how advertising is bought and sold in India today. Programmatic is most certainly the way forward. There are many benefits for all involved – data owners, publishers, brands and agencies, not to mention users themselves,” added Mr. Goyal. 

One of the key reasons telecom operators trust zeotap is its focus on data security and privacy. zeotap is unique in affording data owners complete control and preventing buyers from storing data against persistent identifiers. This solves one of the fundamental problems of the mobile data business, where datasets are still traded loosely and leakage is rampant. zeotap has simultaneously maintained its strict adherence to data de-identification (via methods such as surrogacy, clustering and redaction, among others)to ensure consumer safety. It has already been certified for the new EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that comes into effect in May 2018. “Our unrelenting focus on Privacy by Design principles in systems engineering is one of our most formidable assets,” said Projjol Banerjea, co-founder and Chief Product Officer, who earned the Certified Information Privacy Technologist (CIPT) qualification from the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP) last year. He further added, “Our efforts have not gone unrewarded: We count three of India’s largest telecom operators among our current clients.”

zeotap’s global product and engineering centre is located in Bangalore. The current technical team of 35 is expected to double in strength by the end of the year, with particular emphasis on data engineers and data scientists.

These developments have led to the latest funding round in which New Science Ventures (NSV), a New York based venture fund with $500million under management, and HERE, a leading global provider of mapping and location-based services backed by German automotive companies Audi, BMW and Daimler, join existing investors Capnamic Ventures and Iris Capital (backed by Publicis and Orange Telecom), who also contributed to the new round. zeotap has also attracted several strategic business angels, including Seth Schuler (former SVP Strategy of T-Mobile US), Alex Pentland (Professor at MIT, co-creator of the MIT Media Lab and one of the most cited authors in computer science globally), Mark Grether (co-founder and former COO of Xaxis, the world’s biggest trading desk which is part of GroupM/WPP) and Thomas Duhr (board member of IAB Europe).

“We are happy we could show that we set the right priorities with our privacy-centric platform-based approach. We work hard every day to make a world with data-driven decision making as simple and safe as possible, and it is a very rewarding journey,” said Daniel Heer, co-founder and CEO of zeotap.