With the digital landscape increasingly prioritizing user privacy and moving away from reliance on cookies, companies offering alternative solutions for customer identity management and marketing are gaining prominence. Zeotap, a customer identity platform that leverages a company’s first-party data and integrates it with other data sources to develop comprehensive user profiles, has recently announced a new funding round of $18.5 million.

This investment represents an extension of the firm’s Series C funding and comes solely from SignalFire’s Breakout Fund, which is specifically designated for growth-stage ventures. Established in Berlin and currently operating from New York, Bengaluru (India), and the U.K., Zeotap has now secured a total of $60.5 million for this round, with participation from investors including SingTel (through Innov8), Here (the mapping company), Iris Capital, the European Investment Bank, and several others.

Zeotap has not disclosed its current valuation; however, PitchBook estimates it to be approximately $158 million post-money following the initial closing of the Series C round.

Zeotap initially began as a platform focused on mobile data usage, facilitating data-sharing agreements between mobile carriers and third parties. Over time, its scope has broadened to encompass a more significant opportunity: not merely exchanging data, but consolidating it to construct more insightful customer profiles.

“There are fundamentally two types of organizations today,” he stated. “Those utilizing the current market conditions to re-evaluate their marketing strategies, enhance efficiency, and streamline operations, and those demonstrating resilience and capitalizing on the present environment to expand. Regardless of your position, customer data remains crucial.”

The company currently serves 14 markets, offering products tailored for publishers, brands, and data partners. Zeotap’s platform centers around several core functionalities. First, it provides a customer data platform built on an organization’s existing first-party customer data, creating a unified customer view. “Achieving this is often more complex than anticipated,” Banerjea noted. “Managing consent and maximizing the value of first-party data are paramount.”

The second key component is identity resolution. Zeotap asserts that it maintains the world’s largest marketing identity graph, a “network of identifiers capable of locating a customer across various channels.” This encompasses offline data points like phone numbers, email addresses, and physical addresses, in addition to online browsing behavior. “We can establish a connection to the digital realm for offline identities,” he explained, adding that Zeotap collaborates with approximately 112 providers to integrate data into a single, cohesive customer profile.

These elements converge in Zeotap’s universal ID+ product, which Banerjea described as “fully consent-based and tokenized, ensuring no data leakage.” This solution is offered to clients, enabling their marketing teams to improve their campaigns “across the ecosystem while safeguarding customer privacy and protecting our partners.”

The increasing regulations and the phasing out of cookies are driven by a desire to enhance consumer protection and provide greater transparency regarding data usage. Zeotap’s approach may not entirely resolve these broader concerns—and some argue that advertising and marketing will continue to be fundamental to the internet’s operation—but it aims to create a more secure system for marketing and the data profiling that supports it, as Banerjea clarified.

“ID+ is engineered to connect information without compromising privacy,” he said.

Zeotap identifies two primary types of competitors. These include larger marketing clouds that have expanded through acquisitions, often resulting in siloed operations under a single umbrella, and companies specializing in customer identity management, such as LiveRamp (formerly Acxiom) and The Trade Desk.

However, within an $87 billion industry, and at a time when a robust online strategy is essential for success, there may be space for another player.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated a shift in the marketing landscape as brands invest in data and insights to redirect traditional TV budgets to more effective channels,” stated Chris Scoggins, venture partner at SignalFire, in a press release. “Our investment in Zeotap reflects our confidence 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, ID+.”