Zeotap has raised $6.4 million in a series A round of funding from Capnamic Ventures, Iris Capital, Michael Halbherr, Steffen Roehn, Devin Guan and Peter Scheufen, along with existing investors. The startup will use the funds for building out an engineering centre in Bangalore as well as to expand internationally by opening a new office in New York.
Launched in November last year, Zeotap had previously raised $1.3 million in seed investment at the same time from the HitFox group and other business angels including Peter Zuhlsdorff, Andreas Kindt, Armin Iskander, Stefan Schmitgen and Dirk Freytag.
Zeotap currently offers a solution for telecom operators called Determium, to help gather data from its users. The platform claims its deployment is ‘plug and chug’ letting agencies deploy the solution without network disruption. The platform then aggregates the data between the telecom operator and the user, before stripping it of any personally identifiable information and subsequently using automated algorithms to deliver contextual ads including banner ads, video ads, interstitials and native ads.
Essentially the platform claims to play the middleman between operators and users, collecting anonymous data to sell it to various advertisers. According to Zeotap, telecom operators have as much data as various social networks, however the lack of cookies makes the data un-exploitable, a problem the startup is looking to address.
As of now, Zeotap’s claims to partner with over 100 ad tech platforms including Mopub, Smaato, Appnexus, Mediamath and Inmobi. Its customer list currently includes the telecom operators O2, Vodafone and Telefonica, with the startup in talks with other operators in the US and some Asian countries.