Drawbridge raises $25M as it takes its cross-device tech beyond advertising

Drawbridge, a startup that helps businesses identify when a single person is using multiple devices, has raised $25 million in Series C funding.

Every time I write about Drawbridge, I’m contractually obligated to mention that the company is backed by two of the best-known venture capital firms, Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. For this round, Drawbridge went back to Sequoia to lead, with Kleiner and another previous investor, Northgate Capital, also participating.

More than three years have passed since Drawbridge raised a $14 million Series B. (It has now raised more than $45 million total.) Founder and CEO Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan told me she hadn’t necessarily planned to wait that long before fundraising again, but “the timing was just right for us,” because the company needed time to broaden its strategy, bring on more customers and see the idea of cross-device targeting become “far more mainstream.”

Speaking of broadening its strategy, said the funding will allow Drawbridge to “double down” on its expansion beyond ad-tech. The company was one of the first to work on creating a cross-device graph that allowed advertisers to use data to target consumers across laptops, mobile phones, tablets and more. But now Drawbridge has begun offering this technology to non-advertising customers, too.

After all, one of the big advantages for a company like Facebook is its data about consumers across devices. (Facebook can determine this thanks to user logins, while Drawbridge has to use a “probabilistic” approach that combines statistical models with user behavior to determine when multiple devices are likely to belong to one person.) Sivaramakrishnan is looking to offer that kind of knowledge to other companies for purposes like for website personalization, fraud detection and marketing automation.

“The opportunity that Drawbridge is going after is: How do we use this fundamental asset to power so many different services?” she added. “That’s where our investment is going, into identifying these categories. We’re going to invest int it from a product perspective and a sales perspective.”

The company says that in the last quarter of 2015, it reached an annualized revenue run rate of $100 million — and about half of that didn’t come from advertising. Recent partners include M&C Saatchi Mobile, Oracle and Lyft.

Drawbridge also has global plans. While it already has a small team in London, Sivaramakrishnan said she’s looking to expand in both Europe and Asia.