Tapad
 |
|
| Private | |
| Industry | Technology |
| Founded | 2010 |
| Founder | Are Traasdahl, Founder Dag Liodden, Co-Founder & CTO |
| Headquarters | New York, NY |
|
Key people
|
Sigvart Voss Eriksen |
| Revenue | $34 million (2015) |
|
Number of employees
|
135 |
| Website | www.tapad.com |
Tapad Inc. is a venture-funded startup company that develops and markets software and services for cross-device advertising and content delivery. It uses algorithms to analyze internet and device data and predict whether two or more devices are owned by the same person. Participating websites and apps then cater their advertisements based on a collective knowledge of the user's actions across all of their devices. Tapad was founded in 2010 by Are Traasdahl. It raised $1.8 million in funding in June 2011 and another $6.5 million in March 2013. Telenor Group has on 29 January 2016 entered into an agreement to acquire approximately 95% of Tapad Inc. The purchase price is USD 360 million, on a debt and cash-free 100% basis.
The idea for Tapad was conceived by cofounder and CEO Are Traasdahl at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). He saw attendees switching between televisions, laptops and smartphones and thought that brands should be able to cater their ads to individual users even as they switch between devices. Cofounder and CTO Dag Liodden, Traasdahl, and four others began developing algorithms for the software and founded Tapad in 2010. It took almost a year for the company to obtain its first client, but afterwards the organization grew quickly. In 2011, it raised $1.8 million in funding and opened five more sales offices in major US cities. From mid-2012 to mid-2013, the company hired 44 people and moved its headquarters to a larger office in New York City. Another $6.5 million in funding was raised in March 2013 and $7 million was raised in July 2014 to fund additional expansion in Europe. An additional $18.5 million in funding was raised in July 2015.
On January 29, 2016, Telenor Group entered into an agreement to acquire about 95 percent of Tapad Inc. for $360 million.
Tapad uses data such as cookie IDs, operating system IDs, IP addresses, online registrations and data from partnering publishers to develop a probability that different devices are shared by the same person or household. According to Tapad, none of the data contains personally identifiable information (PII). In a data sample tested by Nielsen, Tapad accurately identified users across devices in 91.2% of cases. This is only slightly less than deterministic methods which require PII.
Tapad is used for advertising to consumers across devices, where a user is shown an ad on their mobile or tablet device based on websites they visited on a desktop or based on a usage behavior that matches an advertiser's target audience. For example, if an Android phone visits a website shortly after a desktop PC from the same home network, Tapad will assess that there is a high probability that the two devices are operated by the same person and will show them similar ads on both devices. According to the company website, its services also include cross-device analytics for things like location, timing, user behavior, and audience analysis.
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