Audience data provider Eyeota raises $12.5M

Eyeota is looking to sell audience data to advertisers around the world, and it’s announcing that it’s raised $12.5 million in Series B funding for further growth.

The company was actually founded back in 2010, but it didn’t raise its Series A until two years ago. CEO Kevin Tan admitted that the company had been “difficult for early-stage investors to wrap their head around,” but he also said that thanks to the founding team’s previous success (Tan and his co-founders were part of the management team at Cox-acquired Adify), the startup was able to fund itself and grow without outside investors.

Tan has said that Eyeota’s founding was prompted by the Adify experience, particularly by seeing the lack of high-quality audience data in international markets. (The company started in Singapore.) He argued that one of his company’s differentiators is simply the quality of its data, which it often buys directly from publishers.

Eyeota has also been expanding into the United States, which Tan said is “obviously a more mature market.” But that’s actually presented the company with opportunities to create new products, usually around features that the company already supported but hadn’t “individually productized” — such as distribution for data partners and tools for onboarding offline data.

“Our growth in the US has been greater than we expected,” Tan said. “We’ve seen consolidation due to acquisitions [and] players that had questionable quality products, so there’s a real big opportunity for us to move and take a really strong place in the market.”

Eyeota has now raised more than $22 million. The new funding was led by French private equity firm Jolt Capital SAS, with participation from Project A Ventures and Qualgro. Jolt partner Laurent Samama is joining Eyeota’s board of directors.