Zeotap Raises $12.7 Mn Series B Funding From New Science Ventures, Others

Zeotap has raised about $12.7 Mn Series B funding. This brings the company’s total funding to about $21.2 Mn.

New Science Ventures (NSV), a New York-based venture fund with $500 Mn under management, and HERE, a leading global provider of mapping and location-based services backed by German automotive companies Audi, BMW, and Daimler participated in this round. Existing investors Capnamic Ventures and Iris Capital (backed by Publicis and Orange Telecom) also contributed to the new round.

Zeotap has also attracted several strategic business angels including Seth Schuler (former SVP Strategy of T-Mobile US), Alex Pentland (Professor at MIT, co-creator of the MIT Media Lab), Mark Grether (co-founder and former COO of Xaxis) and Thomas Duhr (board member of IAB Europe).

Founded in September 2014 by Stephan Schwebe, Daniel Heera, and Projjol Banerjea, Zeotap is a data platform that makes large-scale, deterministic data assets easily accessible to the digital advertising market and other industries for better decision-making.

Zeotap provides data owners complete control and preventing buyers from storing data against persistent identifiers. This solves one of the fundamental problems of the mobile data business, where datasets are still traded loosely and leakage is rampant.

Mozeo, Zeotap’s Indian joint venture established a few months ago with local partner Mogae Media, has reportedly seen strong progress. Sandeep Goyal, Chairman of Mogaé Media said, “Programmatic advertising hasn’t picked up pace in India yet, especially on mobile, even though consumer eyeballs continue to move to mobile and apps dominate consumer time spent. The fundamental reason is the marked scarcity of trustworthy data for targeting. This leads to imprecise and ineffective campaigns that disappoint buyers and curtail their appetite for programmatic advertising.”

Zeotap’s global product and engineering centre is located in Bengaluru. The current technical team of 35 is expected to double in strength by the end of the year, with emphasis on data engineers and data scientists.