Permutive, an audience platform for publishers and advertisers, which enables media to be traded in a privacy-safe way, has secured $75M in Series C from SoftBank Vision Fund 2. It brings Permutive’s total raised to date to $105M, with previous investors EQT Ventures, Octopus Ventures, and ACE & Company also participating. The funding will enable Permutive to grow its patented on-device technology and scale its Audience Platform to create a global privacy-first infrastructure for programmatic advertising, now a $155B industry.
Personal data has powered digital advertising for over ten years; its misuse has captured the attention of regulators and consumers. This reckoning has triggered a seismic power shift from adtech owned programmatic advertising to a publisher owned privacy-first web. Via Permutive’s Audience Platform, which has seen a 20x growth in targeted ads in the last two years, publishers can deliver a personalized advertising experience without compromising privacy via consented first-party data. The company has built a client roster comprising some of the most highly regarded publishers in Europe and North America, including News Corp, Hearst, BuzzFeed, Penske, The Guardian, Vox Media, Insider, Hubert Burda Media and Condé Nast International.
“Publishers are the foundation of the web, and the relationship they have with their users is the backbone of digital advertising,” says Joe Root, CEO and co-founder, Permutive. “As privacy shifts the economics of the internet towards this publisher-owned web, a privacy-first infrastructure will ensure this next iteration of digital advertising is immune to privacy chaos, will scale, and thrive.”
Advertisers are buying directly from publishers because they are a stable foundation for data-driven advertising and are trusted partners when navigating the impact of browser changes and tightening privacy regulations. But without an infrastructure to support this transition to a publisher-owned privacy-first web, the industry won’t achieve scale. Permutive has created a new model for digital advertising with privacy at its core, where publishers and advertisers can own and control their data while planning and buying campaigns. This brings transparency, scale and privacy to programmatic advertising for the first time.
“To underpin a privacy-first web requires unique technology. As a leader in on-device technology, Permutive can bring a complicated landscape that’s being significantly disrupted into a privacy-safe future. The company’s technology is now running on over 1 billion devices a month globally, and we see tremendous opportunity for sustained growth as on-device processing reshapes adtech,” says Max Ohrstrand, investor for SoftBank Investment Advisers.
Permutive are a client of Bluestripe Communications, part of The Bluestripe Group, publishers of New Digital Age
