San Francisco, CA: TapFwd announced the launch of its mobile data marketplace, as well as a $3 million dollar seed round led by Partech Ventures. TapFwd will use the funding to expand the capabilities and coverage of its mobile data marketplace, which currently processes 250 billion data points daily, across offline, online, and mobile channels.
Other participants in the round include Boldstart Ventures, Vaizra Investments, and Tekton Ventures, as well as prominent angel investors Jared Kopf (founder of AdRoll), Auren Hoffman (founder of LiveRamp), Ben Narasin (GP at Canvas Ventures), Mike Driscoll (founder of Metamarkets), and Jonah Goodhart (founder of Moat).
“We’re excited to embark on this next chapter in TapFwd’s development, and offer ad networks, publishers, and marketers an unrivaled amount of rich, person-level mobile data,” said Alex Wasserman, Co-Founder and CEO of TapFwd. “TapFwd’s mobile data marketplace brings sophisticated, data-driven decision making to mobile marketing, making it clear that mobile is no longer a black box.”
Traditionally, ad networks, publishers, and marketers had limited access to person-level data, which resulted in untargeted mobile ads and wasted dollars. To address this challenge, TapFwd spent two years building Cerebro, which powers its new mobile data marketplace. Over the course of a day, Cerebro processes 250 billion data points on over 500 million mobile devices, gathering anonymized person-level data across offline, online, and mobile sources and, through a mix of deterministic and probabilistic methods, mapping it to device IDs.
“Partech Ventures is proud to support the team at TapFwd,” said Nicolas El Baze, General Partner of Partech Ventures. “Mobile marketing spend is expected to surpass $40 billion in the U.S. by the end of 2016, yet it’s still difficult for advertisers to run targeted mobile campaigns. TapFwd’s team understands this, and is doing its part to ensure ad networks, publishers, and marketers can easily access and employ high quality, person-level data for all of their mobile advertising needs.”
TapFwd customers have already used TapFwd’s mobile data marketplace to run targeted campaigns on behalf of fast growing mobile-first companies. Inside TapFwd’s marketplace, customers have access to all of TapFwd’s data, labeled and organized to reflect total number of associated device IDs and original source. From there, customers can build an audience segment by selecting from a number of categories, including automotive, financial, purchase history, and demographics. Once an audience is defined, a customer can export the data and use it to run mobile ads on any network or bring it back in-house for internal marketing use.
