German startup Zeotap raises €9.31M in Series C extension round for its customer intelligence platform; know more here

Berlin-based Zeotap, a customer intelligence platform (CIP) that helps brands better understand their customers and predict behaviours, announced that it has raised $11M (approx €9.31M) in extension to its Series C round of funding. This brings the company’s total funding to $90M (approx €76.18M).

The current extension round follows Zeotap’s $42M funding in July 2020, followed by an initial extension of $18.5M (approx €15.6M) in November from SignalFire’s Breakout Fund. 

This extension enables new investors such as Liberty Global Ventures to come on board, following oversubscription to previous rounds.

Investors in the current round

The current round’s investors include several senior executives across global SaaS and retail. Liberty Global Ventures, whose portfolio includes Skillz, Lacework, and Samba TV, was one of many investors who contributed to the round. Other new investors include Richard Pennycook CBE (former CEO of the Co-operative Group).

Speaking on the development, founder & CEO of Zeotap, Daniel Heer says, “With our last investment round and extension so oversubscribed, we’re pleased to now have the opportunity to bring new investors on board. This further fuels the incredible momentum that we’ve generated since the launch of our platform, and we’re excited to have even more support on this journey.”

Since its last extension round, the company has reported 126 per cent ARR growth in 2020 (a 201 per cent Y-o-Y growth in subscription revenue). The company also claims to have signed several new clients, including Virgin Media, DER Touristik, and Nestlé, and partnered with over 60 leading European publishers on ID+.

Kay Schwabedal, Chief Digital Officer of Virgin Media O2, and Liberty Global’s UK Joint Venture with Telefónica, says, “Zeotap’s drive to put privacy at the heart of customer data initiatives is unique in the space and arrives exactly when the market needs it more than ever. It’s no surprise that this has resulted in an incredible growth trajectory, and we’re thrilled to be on board to support this mission.”

Next-generation Customer Data Platform

Founded in 2014 by Daniel Heer and Projjol Banerjea, Zeotap is a Customer Intelligence Platform (CIP) that helps brands better understand their customers and predict behaviours, enabling them to invest in customer relationships and products that matter.

Projjol Banerjea, explains, “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 personalisation to Machine Learning-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.”

The company enables brands to build on a nucleus of first-party data to gain new customers and grow its loyal base. Its independent but integrated modules include customer data unification, identity resolution, enrichment, analytics/modeling (including in data clean rooms), and activation to over more than 100 partners in the marketing ecosystem.

The company claims that its platform meets the highest enterprise data privacy and security standards, including GDPR, ISO 27001, and CSA STAR.

Recent developments

Zeotap’s Customer Intelligence Platform (CIP) was launched in 2020 as a next-generation Customer Data Platform (CDP) designed to deliver on the challenging compliance requirements of the European market. 

ID+, Zeotap’s Universal ID solution, was also launched last year to enable brands and publishers to resolve identities at scale when third-party cookies are deprecated in 2023.

Recently, the company announced the launch of Predictive Audiences, which enables users of Zeotap’s Customer Intelligence Platform to create and activate machine-learned segments without needing data science expertise.