Zeotap, a Customer Intelligence Platform (CIP) that helps brands understand their customers and predict behaviours, announced on November 17 that it has raised an additional $18.5 million in its extended Series C funding round from data-driven venture capital firm SignalFire. The investment was made from the firm's Breakout Fund for growth-stage companies and is an addition to the $42 million announced earlier this year, bringing the total Series C round to $60.5 million.

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This extension round, which closed in November, comes as Zeotap has experienced an increased demand for its customer data intelligence capabilities to serve top marketers and publishers across the globe. Zeotap plans to use the new funds in its customer data platform (CDP) and ID+ universal marketing identity products as well as accelerate the adoption of its platform across 14 active markets.

Chris Scoggins, Venture Partner at SignalFire said, "COVID-19 has catalyzed a transformation in the marketing mix as brands invest in their data and learnings to redirect traditional TV budgets to more effective channels. Our investment in Zeotap is testament to our belief in the company’s leadership, vision, and its rapidly evolving customer intelligence platform (CIP) with a built-in identity solution for the future of marketing named ID+."

Walter Kortschak, Managing Partner and Executive Chairman at SignalFire shared, "We’re thoroughly impressed by how the Zeotap team has built an industry-leading customer data platform for brands with integrated identity resolution capabilities, reimagining how its data assets can further differentiate the company’s product leadership."

Daniel Heer, Founder & CEO of Zeotap elaborated, "We are humbled by the confidence our investors have placed in us. This further validates our strategy as a single, integrated customer data marketing suite in contrast to scattered point solutions. Our full-stack customer intelligence platform delivers on quicker deployments, lower costs, and operational efficiencies that arise from working with one, not several, vendors."

"Despite the flurry of activity in this space, when one cuts through the fluff, it's astonishing how few solutions can actually deliver on fundamental industry-agnostic customer data requirements for brands, such as unified customer views that reflect granular consent permissions, and can power everything from real-time personalization to ML-based analytics for better marketing outcomes. Even fewer options exist for advanced marketers to augment first-party data with curated external assets within the same platform," said Projjol Banerjea, Founder & CPO of Zeotap.

The platform natively integrates different customer data capabilities that together address marketers' needs to manage, connect, enrich, segment, and activate customer data. Unlike legacy DMPs or CDPs, Zeotap combines first and third-party worlds by augmenting marketers' first-party data with high-quality identity and data assets curated from 100+ often exclusive partners, thus enabling a more complete view of customer behavior while maintaining strict compliance to the highest data privacy standards. With Zeotap, brands get more out of their existing systems while experiencing a lower cost of ownership and a much faster time to value.

"Having watched the market evolve over the last decade, I am thoroughly convinced that the time has arrived for a solution like Zeotap that has been purpose-built from the ground up to solve the evolving problem of true Customer Intelligence. This full-stack integration is essential to deliver the key advantages of seamless workflows, interoperability, and rapid ongoing product innovation that marketers need right now," said Taylor Barada, former VP, Global Head of Corporate Development, Corporate Strategy & Strategic Partnerships.

Zeotap is leading the way in identity resolution by developing a cookieless identity solution based on the world's largest deterministic marketing identity graph. As a founding member of the ID+, a universal marketing ID initiative, Zeotap enables its platform clients to easily gain access to this natively embedded solution to future-proof one-to-one marketing for brands and publishers.

"Zeotap has rapidly evolved to an Identity Cloud for marketing that provides multiple class-leading customer data products under one roof, including one of the top two universal ID solutions globally. It’s a necessarily compelling proposition for brands," said Rob Norman, Zeotap advisor and former Chief Digital Officer of GroupM.

First Published:Nov 17, 2020 3:52 PM IST