Sincera doesn’t fall neatly into an existing category.
When the data startup – which closed its $4.2 million seed funding on Tuesday – launched in early 2022, co-founders Mike O’Sullivan and Ian Meyers would refer to their company as a “media telemetry service.”
By which they mean they can generate insights about everything that’s happening in the code on a given webpage, such as whether consent is being collected properly, which identity providers are installed, how many ad slots there are and how often those slots are being refreshed – anything really.
Hearing that description, VCs typically tossed Sincera into the verification bucket. O’Sullivan and Meyers would often hear, “Oh, so you’re like Moat 2.0, right?”
Which sort of fit.
But a conversation this summer with Jeff Green, CEO of The Trade Desk, helped crystallize Sincera’s positioning, according to Sullivan. After listening to the spiel, Green said, “You guys sound like a metadata company.”
Chaos and promise
And then it clicked.
“Because, yes, that is exactly what we do,” said O’Sullivan, who was VP of product at Index Exchange when he met Meyers, then-head of addressability product at LiveRamp. “We provide additional data to companies so they can build products or run better services.”
As former product managers themselves who spent years in the technical trenches of ad tech, Meyers and O’Sullivan know what it’s like to try and build things in a messy industry full of jury-rigged technology.
Ad tech is gnarly – and not in a totally tubular kind of way, unless “tubes” is a reference to the web’s overly complex programmatic pipework.
But there’s a heck of a lot of data and metadata flowing through these pipes, and that data can be helpful for managing some of ad tech’s trickiest (and most embarrassing) challenges – so long as the data can be unearthed, captured and applied quickly enough.
“It’s a very promising time in ad tech,” Meyers said, “but also a very chaotic time, because of how much change is happening, and companies need the raw materials to build, improve and de-risk their products.”
Data about data
But what does a metadata provider actually do?
Ad tech companies need a ton of different data inputs before they can develop a product or improve an existing one, whether that’s made-for-advertising (MFA) detection, inventory quality management, cookieless identity solutions, attention measurement or consent collection tools.
Gathering all of the necessary metadata signals to build these products is a heavy lift, O’Sullivan said, and internal engineering teams usually have limited resources and are working on tight timelines.
If, for example, an ad tech company wants to create a tool that detects and avoids MFA sites, it needs to know whether the site in question has a high ad load, exactly what the ad load is, the ads-to-content ratio, whether there’s a CPU spike when someone visits the URL, how many affiliate vendors are present … and that’s just a start.
Or take an attention-based targeting tool. To build one, an ad tech company would need to know – for millions of URLs – whether there are multiple videos playing at one time on a single page, how much ad clutter is on the page, each unit’s ad refresh rate, whether ads auto-refresh, the minimum and maximum number of ads on a page at any given moment – etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
“But if you have all of this data at your fingertips, you can get to market faster, ”O’Sullivan said. “The more data you have, the better decisions you can make and the better products you can build.”
Staying independent
But Sincera doesn’t make money on a client’s product.
If, say, an ad tech company builds a cookieless solution using data from Sincera and charges its own clients on a CPM basis, Sincera doesn’t see any of that money. Which is how Sincera maintains its neutrality, Sullivan said.
Instead of taking a slice of the CPM (the ad tech model), Sincera charges a $10,000 monthly fee for access to metadata (plus an additional per-URL processing fee) and only works with ad tech companies – not publishers or advertisers.
LiveRamp, for example, came to Sincera to get a read on how publishers were using its and other identity solutions, because it was quicker and more scalable to do so than measuring adoption company by company.
ID5 uses Sincera to see how many publishers are ingesting the ID5 identifier in bid requests, and The Trade Desk, meanwhile, is using Sincera to help with made-for-advertising detection.
“We’re not putting any spin on the ball,” O’Sullivan said. “We just provide inputs and show ad tech companies the reality of what’s happening in an environment.”
Planting the seed round
That independent approach and business model was appealing to a roster of industry investors.
NextView Ventures, which was part of TripleLift’s seed funding in 2012, is leading Sincera’s seed round, with participation from AperiamVentures, LiveRamp Ventures and The Trade Desk’s TD7 venture group. (Sincera is The Trade Desk’s second-ever investment. The first was Chalice Custom Algorithms in 2021.)
There’s also a group of hot-shot angels pitching in, including Jonah Goodhart (of Moat fame), Ari Paparo (needs no introduction), Auren Hoffman (LiveRamp’s founder) and Dave Yaffe (who sold his data startup Arbor to LiveRamp in 2016).
But their interest in Sincera is as much about the people behind the technology as it is about tech itself.
O’Sullivan and Meyers have what you might call a particular set of skills – product management, strategy and an understanding of the business side and inner workings of ad tech – and they plan to spend part of their seed funding to find others with a similar background.
The rest of the funding will go toward computing costs, which is by far Sincera’s biggest expenditure. The more compute they can finance, the more URLs they can analyze, which will help with growth and eventual profitability.
“Oh, and health insurance will also be nice, too,” O’Sullivan (half) joked.*
*O’Sullivan confirmed after publication that he was, in fact, “completely serious about the healthcare.”
