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Ketch raises $23M to automate privacy and data compliance
Ketch, a startup aiming to help businesses navigate the increasingly complex world of online privacy regulation and data compliance, is announcing that it has raised $23 million in Series A funding.
The company is also officially coming out of stealth. I actually wrote about Ketch’s free PrivacyGrader tool last year, but now it’s revealing the broader vision, as well as the products that businesses will actually be paying for.
The startup was founded by CEO Tom Chavez and CTO Vivek Vaidya. The pair previously founded Krux, a data management platform acquired by Salesforce in 2016, and Vaidya told me that Ketch is the answer to a question that they’d begun to ask themselves: “What kind of infrastructure can we build that will make our former selves better?”
Chavez said that Ketch is designed to help businesses automate the process of remaining compliant with data regulations, wherever their visitors and customers are. He suggested that with geographically specific regulations like Europe’s GDPR in place, there’s a temptation to comply globally with the most stringent rules, but that’s not necessary or desirable.
“It’s possible to use data to grow and to comply with the regulations,” Chavez said. “One of our customers turned off digital marketing completely in order to comply. This has got to stop […] They are a very responsible customer, but they didn’t know there are tools to navigate this complexity.”
Image Credits: Ketch
The pair also suggested that things are even more complex than you might think, because true compliance means going beyond the “Hollywood façade” of a privacy banner — it requires actually implementing a customer’s requests across multiple platforms. For example, Vaidya said that when someone unsubscribes to your email list, there’s “a complex workflow that needs to be executed to ensure that the email is not going to continue … and make sure the customer’s choices are respected in a timely manner.”
After all, Chavez noted, if a customer tells you, “I want to delete my data,” and yet they keep getting marketing emails or targeted ads, they’re not going to be satisfied if you say, “Well, I’ve handled that in the four walls of my own business, that’s an issue with my marketing and email partners.”
Chavez also said that Ketch isn’t designed to replace any of a business’ existing marketing and customer data tools, but rather to “allow our customers to configure how they want to comply vis-à-vis what jurisdiction they’re operating in.” For example, the funding announcement includes a statement from Patreon’s legal counsel Priya Sanger describing Ketch as “an easily configurable consent management and orchestration system that was able to be deployed internationally” that “required minimal engineering time to integrate into our systems.”
As for the Series A, it comes from CRV, super{set} (the startup studio founded by Chavez and Vaidya), Ridge Ventures, Acrew Capital and Silicon Valley Bank. CRV’s Izhar Armony and Acrew’s Theresia Gouw are joining Ketch’s board of directors.
And if you’d like to learn more about the product, Ketch is hosting a webinar at 11am Pacific today.
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Kargo unveils its new Fabrik publishing system
Digital advertising company Kargo is launching a new product and new business unit called Fabrik.
Founder and CEO Harry Kargman explained that Fabrik is a content management system designed for publishers’ modern needs and integrated with Kargo’s advertising technology.
Kargman suggested that he sees this as part of Kargo’s broader mission of “saving publishing.” That might seem like a tall order for an ad business, but he said the company has tried to do that “by driving extraordinary ad experiences and monetization.” And yet, he’s come to realize, “That’s not enough.”
In particular, Kargman came to realize that many websites have “too much weight” and load far too slowly (to illustrate his point, he loaded the TechCrunch homepage, and it was indeed slower than I would like). This drives readers away and also has a detrimental effect on Google search rankings.
So the goal with Fabrik is to create a “lightning fast” web experience, which you can see for yourself on the OK Magazine website. Fabrik says that one of the key steps to achieving this speed is by eliminating the need for third-party trackers and plugins — in fact, Kargman described plugins as “the death of the internet” and told me he often asks publishers, “Do you want to make money, or do you want to have a lot of plugins?”
“We built it for Google’s best practices and the core Web Vitals,” added COO Michael Shaughnessy. “We’re very strategic about how we load items that would really slow us down.”
This launch comes as many publishers are exploring business models beyond advertising, such as subscriptions and memberships. Shaughnessy suggested that Fabrik is complementary to those efforts, because it’s “simplifying the foundation,” thus freeing teams to focus on new commercial initiatives.
As for the advertising side, Kargman said, “We think we’ve built our adtech directly into Fabrik in a way that there’s absolutely no reason not to use Kargo — but certainly, it doesn’t require you to exclusively use Kargo. We expect publishers to monetize their own sites, to cut branded entertainment deals, to do all the good things that they do.”
And as previously mentioned, the plan is for Fabrik to be a separate business unit under the Kargo’s corporate umbrella, with its own customers and its own CEO — Kargman said he’s talking to a potential hire, but it’s “not quite ready yet to announce.”
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Martech company Zeta Global raises $222.5M in debt
Zeta Global, the marketing technology company founded by David A. Steinberg and former Apple CEO John Sculley, is announcing an additional $222.5 million in new debt financing.
The company has gone down the debt route before — a Series F raised in 2017 combined $115 million funding with $25 million in debt. BofA Securities served as lead arranger and bookrunner for the new financing, with participation from Barclays, Credit Suisse and Morgan Stanley Senior Funding.
“For this round, we were able to both refinance our debt and add in a large amount of capacity for current operations and future initiatives,” Steinberg (Zeta’s CEO) told me via email. “We were able to work with our syndicate to capture a low interest rate and take advantage of the strong credit markets.”
The company emphasizes its data-driven approach to marketing, combining companies’ first-party data with artificial intelligence and what it says are more than 2.4 billion customer identifiers. Steinberg said this approach has only become more crucial, with 2020 delivering “a five-year acceleration” as brands face the challenge of “digitally transforming their business structure to be data-centric.”
“Zeta’s capabilities are helping marketers engage customers across the entire digital ecosystem more intelligently and efficiently, with individualized messages, offers, and content by way of our identity-based data and predictive AI,” Steinberg continued. “Our challenge is to continue to keep up with our customers’ needs and maintain our competitive advantage around data and AI.”
The company’s funding announcement notes that previous loans have been used to finance acquisitions and integrations, including commenting platform Disqus and machine learning-powered marketing platform Boomtrain. Asked whether this new debt will also be used for acquisitions, Steinberg said the company continues to “organically innovate,” with a focus on its customer data platform and connected TV capabilities.
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Blueshift raises $30M for its AI-based, integrated approach to marketing
The concept of the “marketing cloud” — sold by the likes of Salesforce, Oracle and Adobe — has become a standard way for large tech companies to package together and sell marketing tools to businesses that want to improve how they use digital channels to grow their business.
Some argue, however, that “cloud”, singular, might be a misnomer: typically those tools are not integrated well with each other and effectively are run as separate pieces of software. Today a startup called Blueshift — which claims to offer an end-to-end marketing stack, by having built it from the ground up to include both traditional marketing data as well as customer experience — is announcing some funding, pointing to the opportunity to build more efficient alternatives.
The startup has closed a round of $30 million, a Series C that co-founder and CEO Vijay Chittoor said it will be using to expand to more markets (it’s most active in the U.S. and Europe currently) and also to expand its technology.
“The product already has a unified format, to ingest data from multiple sources and redistribute that out to apps. Now, we want to distribute that data to more last-mile applications,” he said in an interview. “Our biggest initiative is to scale out the notion of us being not just an app but a platform.”
The company’s customers include LendingTree, Discovery Inc., Udacity, BBC and Groupon, and it has seen revenue growth of 858% in the last three years, although it’s not disclosing actual revenues, nor valuation, today.
The round is being led by Fort Ross Ventures, with strong participation also from Avatar Growth Capital. Past investors Softbank Ventures Asia (which led its last round of $15 million), Storm Ventures, Conductive Ventures and Nexus Venture Partners also invested.
The concept for Blueshift came out of Chittoor’s direct experience at Groupon — which acquired his previous startup, social e-commerce company Mertado — and before that a long period at Walmart Labs — which Walmart rebranded after it acquired another startup where Chittoor was an early employee, semantic search company Kosmix.
“The challenges we are solving today we saw firsthand as challenges our customers saw at Groupon and Walmart,” he said. “The connected customer journey is creating a thousand times more data than before, and people and brands are engaging across more touchpoints. Tracking that has become harder with legacy channel-centric applications.”
Blueshift’s approach for solving that has been, he said, “to unify the data and to make decisions at customer level.”
That is to say, although the customer experience today is very fragmented — you might potentially encounter something about a company or brand in multiple places, such as in a physical environment, on various social media platforms, in your email, through a web search, in a vertical search portal, in a marketplace on a site, in an app, and so on — the experience for marketers should not be.
The company addresses this by way of a customer data platform (CDP) it markets as “SmartHub.” Designed for non-technical users although customizable by engineers if you need it to be, users can integrate different data feeds from multiple sources, which then Blueshift crunches and organises to let you view in a more structured way.
That data can then be used to power actions in a number of places where you might be setting up marketing campaigns. And Chittoor pointed out — like other marketing people have — that these days, the focus on that is largely first-party data to fuel that machine, rather than buying in data from third-party sources (which is definitely part of a bigger trend).
“Our mission is to back category-leading companies that are poised to dominate a market. Blueshift clearly stood out to us as the leader in the enterprise CDP space,” said Ratan Singh of Fort Ross Ventures in a statement. “We are thrilled to partner with the Blueshift team as they accelerate the adoption of their SmartHub CDP platform.” Singh is joining Blueshift’s board with this round.
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Emotive raises $50M to make text marketing more conversational
While more businesses are turning to text messages as a marketing channel, Emotive CEO Brian Zatulove argued that most of them are just treating it as another “newsletter blast.”
“The reason the channel performs so well is it’s not saturated,” Zatulove said. But that’s changing, and as it does, companies will have to do more to “cut through the noise.”
That’s what he said Emotive enables, with a platform focused on text marketing that feels like a real conversation with another human being, rather than just another email blast. He compared it to the sales associate who would greet you when you first walked into a department store, pre-COVID.
“The online sales associate really didn’t exist,” he said. “That’s what we’re trying to provide.”
Emotive saw 466% year-over-year revenue growth in 2020 and is announcing today that it has raised $50 million in a Series B funding round that values the company at $400 million. It was led by CRV, with participation from Mucker Capital, TenOneTen Ventures and Stripes.
Image Credits: Emotive
“Never underestimate the importance of building a product that your customers, and your customers’ customers adore,” said CRV general partner Murat Bicer in a statement. “One of the things that struck us about Emotive is the sheer amount of customer love Brian and [co-founder Zachary Wise] get from meal delivery services, manufacturing companies and even toddler shoe brands. Small businesses find it easy to set up campaigns and their customers genuinely prefer communicating with someone over text rather than email.”
Zatulove said he founded the company with Wise after they’d worked together on cannabis loyalty startup Reefer, eventually deciding there was a bigger opportunity after their early successes with text marketing. He explained that while Emotive works with larger customers, its sweet spot is mid-sized e-commerce businesses on Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce and WooCommerce.
Because those businesses usually don’t have any salespeople of their own yet, Emotive serves that function. It can start conversations around shopping cart abandonment and promote sales and new products, resulting in what the company says are 8% to 10% conversion rates (compared to 1% or 2% for a standard text marketing campaign). Zatulove said the platform largely relied on human responders at first, and although it’s become increasingly automated, Emotive still has an internal team handling responses when necessary.
“We never plan on losing that human touch as part of the dialog,” he added. “We see ourselves as a human-to-human marketing platform. That’s our biggest differentiator.”
Emotive had previously raised $8.2 million in funding, according to Crunchbase. Zatulove said this new round will allow the company to continue developing the product, to grow its headcount to more than 200 people and to open offices in Atlanta and Boston. Eventually, it could also expand beyond texting.
“Longer term, we see ourselves more as a conversation platform, not just as a text message platform,” he said.
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IronSource acquires video and playable ad platform Luna Labs
Mobile advertising company ironSource is announcing its second acquisition of the year — Luna Labs, a startup that’s built a platform allowing app developers to create and manage video and playable ads.
When I first wrote about the startup in 2019, its main selling point was the ability to create those ads directly from the Unity game engine used by many developers. Since then, it has expanded its platform to support the creation of both playable and video ads (including unlimited variations of a gameplay video), manage their entire ad library, analyze their performance and even automatically optimize them based on install data. Its customers include Crazy Labs, Supersonic Studios, Lion Studios, Kwalee and Voodoo.
IronSource, meanwhile, has built a platform for mobile user growth and monetization. It was valued at more than $1 billion in its most recent funding round of more than $400 million, and in January it announced the acquisition of ad measurement company Soomla.
In a statement, ironSource’s co-founder and chief revenue officer Omer Kaplan said:
Our vision at ironSource is to build the most comprehensive growth platform for app developers, allowing them to focus on content creation and on building a great user experience, while we provide the infrastructure for their business expansion. Creatives are a key part of that and have only become more important as competition for user attention grows. But ad creative development and testing at scale is incredibly difficult and costly. Luna Labs solves that by bringing high quality end-to-end ad creation management to app developers, and we’re excited to be able to add that capability into the ironSource platform.
The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. IronSource says that the Luna Labs team (currently based in the United Kingdom) will remain in its current offices, where it will continue developing its technology “under the ironSource umbrella.”
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Acast acquires podcasting startup RadioPublic
Podcast advertising company Acast is announcing that it has acquired RadioPublic, the startup that spun out of public radio marketplace PRX in 2016.
At first, RadioPublic’s main product was a mobile app for podcast listening, and it still supports the app. But co-founder and Chief Product Officer Matt MacDonald said that over time, the team’s focus shifted to products for podcasters, specifically its Listener Relationship Management Platform, which includes an embeddable web player, custom websites called Podsites and more.
“We had a whole roadmap of things we wanted to build, but we recognized that at our scale, we could be better served by partnering up with bigger organizations,” MacDonald said.
And ultimately, they decided Acast made sense as not just a partner, but an owner. Acast’s business still revolves around podcast advertising, but it’s also expanded with new tools like the Acast Open hosting platform, and it says it now hosts 20,000 podcasts, collectively reaching 300 million monthly listeners.
“The acquisition of RadioPublic is fundamentally a partnership of values,” said Acast’s chief business and strategy officer Leandro Saucedo in a statement. “We both firmly believe in the open ecosystem of podcasting and have a shared commitment to aid listener discovery and support all creators. We’re impressed by what RadioPublic has achieved and we believe that now — as podcasting is gaining more momentum than ever before — is the ideal time to bring RadioPublic’s talented team and company missions into the Acast fold.”
The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but Acast says it will not affect RadioPublic operationally.
MacDonald and his co-founder/CTO Chris Quamme Rhoden are both joining Acast (CEO Jake Shapiro departed last fall to lead creator partnerships for Apple Podcasts), and although they’ll be working to integrate RadioPublic features into the Acast platform, MacDonald said the startup will continue to support its own products and mobile apps for “the foreseeable future.”
He added that as RadioPublic works with Acast, the team will remain focused on “strengthening and deepening that relationship, that bond, that affinity between the podcaster and the listener.” In his view, that’s where RadioPublic’s opportunity lies, even as big platforms like Spotify invest in podcasting.
“How do we enable you, as the creator, to control the relationship you have with your audience?” MacDonald said. “We believe that a podcast’s listeners are the podcast’s listeners. They are not the platform’s customers.”
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Ad Practitioners acquires Knoq to move the startup’s door-to-door marketing approach online
Knoq (formerly known as Polis) was a startup that recruited representatives to go door-to-door in their neighborhoods, talking up client products and services. So for obvious reasons, it faced challenges in 2020.
“We stopped knocking on doors in February, and this summer, we were trying to figure out what the path forward was,” founder and CEO Kendall Tucker told me.
The company had already pivoted once, shifting focus from political work to commercial marketing. But Tucker said Knoq also had some attractive assets, namely its “unique, huge consumer models” designed to predict whether someone would be interested in a given product, as well as “the experience of building out these teams of neighborhood representatives.”
So after what she described as a competitive bidding process, Knoq was acquired by Ad Practitioners, a digital media company that owns properties like Money.com and ConsumersAdvocate.org.
As part of Ad Practitioners, Tucker said Knoq’s network of “Knoqers” will be able to interact with visitors to those properties and help “pair consumers with the right product,” whether that’s auto insurance or software. After all, she noted that plenty of consumers are connecting with Ad Practitioners via chat bots and phone calls: “These are people already asking for help … we’re really just connecting the dots.”
Image Credits: Knoq
In the acquisition announcement, Ad Practitioners CEO Greg Powel made a similar point, saying that the deal represents “a shared vision of helping people make decisions through conversations driven by data and technology while educating people about products and services that matter.”
“The Money and ConsumersAdvocate.org brands are already trusted by millions of highly engaged users,” Powel continued. “Together, we foresee a world where consumers come to our sites for great content [and] reviews and to speak with representatives who can help them find the personal information they need.”
Knoq leadership has already moved to join Ad Practitioners in Puerto Rico, with the rest of the Knoq team set to relocate later this year as well.
You might think a startup would be inclined to stay put in its current location (in Knoq’s case, Boston), at least for the duration of the pandemic, but Tucker said she’s a big believer in seeing your team in person. In fact, the Knoq team had socially distanced outdoor meetups over the summer, “to brainstorm or just hang out and make sure people are okay.” Plus, she’s excited about the possibility of “hiring the amazing people on this island.”
The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Knoq had most recently raised $2.5 million from Initialized Capital and Haystack.vc, and Tucker said it was crucial that the acquisition provided a good outcome not just for her team and herself, but also her investors.
“We’re so excited for Kendall and her team on their successful exit to Ad Practitioners,” said Initialized General Partner Alda Leu Dennis in a statement. “It’s been a pleasure partnering with Knoq over the last few years. The Knoq team will bring a tech-forward approach to sales outreach and customer analytics. And, Kendall’s skills as a brilliant builder, operator and strategic thinker will be a huge asset for Ad Practitioners.”
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Scalarr raises $7.5M to fight mobile ad fraud
Scalarr, a startup that says it uses machine learning to combat ad fraud, is announcing that it has raised $7.5 million in Series A funding.
The company was founded by CEO Inna Ushakova and CPO Yuriy Yashunin, who previously led the mobile marketing agency Zenna. Ushakova told me that while at Zenna, they realized that ad fraud had grown to the point that it posed a real threat to their business.
At the same time, the team wasn’t impressed by any of the existing anti-fraud solutions, so it built its own technology. Eventually, they shut down Zenna completely and moved the entire team over to Scalarr.
The startup’s products include AutoBlock, which is supposed to detect fraud before the advertiser bids on an ad, and DeepView, which is used by adtech platforms (including ad exchanges, demand-side platforms and supply-side platforms).
Scalarr says it can detect 60% more fraud than existing products on the market and that it saved its clients $22 million in ad fraud refunds in 2020. Ushakova attributed this in large part to the startup’s extensive use of machine learning technology.
She added that while large ad attribution companies are adding anti-fraud products, they aren’t the focus. And historically, companies have tried to detect fraud through a “rules-based approach,” where there’s a list of behaviors that suggest fraudulent activity — but no matter how quickly they create those rules, it’s hard to keep up with the fraudsters.
“Fraud is ever evolving,” Ushakova said. “It’s like a Tom and Jerry game, so they are ahead of you and we are trying to catch them.”
As for why machine learning works so much more effectively, she said, “Only ML could help you predict the next step, and with ML, you should be able to detect abnormalities that are not classified. Right after that, our analytics should be able to take a look at those abnormalities and decide whether something is statistically important.”
Scalarr’s Series A was led by the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development, with participation from TMT Investments, OTB Ventures and Speedinvest. Among other things, the company will use the money to expand its presence in Asia and continue developing the product.
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Zynga CEO says he’s on the lookout for more acquisitions
If you’re wondering why Zynga issued $875 million in convertible notes at the end of 2020, CEO Frank Gibeau said the company was fundraising to build up a “war chest” for more acquisitions.
“As you know, we’ve been a consolidator inside of this business for a while, and we’re going to continue to be on offense [looking for] great companies, great cultures, great teams that we can bring into Zynga,” Gibeau told me.
In the last year alone, Zynga acquired two game studios based in Istanbul — Peak Games for $1.8 billion and Rollic for $180 million (in the latter case, it only acquired 80% of the company initially).
“There are now four or five examples of us having done this successfully,” Gibeau said. “When we started, nobody was picking up our phone calls. Now when we call, we are a bit of a destination of choice for a lot of developers out there.”
Gibeau and I were speaking about Zynga’s fourth quarter earnings, in which the company reported all-time high revenue of $616 million and a net loss of $53 million (though another measure of profitability, adjusted EBITDA, was actually positive at $90 million). Daily active users were up 77% year over year, to 36 million, while monthly active users were up 103%, to 134 million.
Looking ahead, Zynga is forecasting revenue of $2.6 billion (a 32% year-over-year increase) and adjusted EBITDA of $450 million for 2021. And while another acquisition could significantly grow the business, Gibeau noted that the company’s forecasts have “no acquisitions assumed,” adding, “We’re in a great position, because we would prefer to do acquisitions in 2021, but we don’t have to do any deals.”
There are new games lined up for 2021, including Puzzle Combat, Farmville 3 and a Star Wars title. The company also plans to continue developing hypercasual games, to develop more cross-platform games, to expand internationally and to continue building out its ad network — in fact, he suggested that Apple’s upcoming privacy changes could be good for Zynga.
“A lot of traditional marketing services are not going to be able to survive very well,” he said. “Because we’re a first-party data company — all the data we generate is coming to our services from our games — and because we’re at scale … IDFA is an opportunity for our company.”
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