YC-backed Blotout raises $3m seed round for customer data infrastructure that builds trust.

Privacy gives our lives dignity and yet we find ourselves in a digital world where too many companies choose to track us without our consent.

This has led to a backlash. Every other user blocks trackers. Apple killed third-party cookies and bet its brand on privacy. Regulators, finally catching up, are passing stringent privacy laws. In 2022, California will drop the distinction between selling or sharing data — enterprises need your permission if they’re going to share your data with any third party SaaS.

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This is great for users. It’s a disaster for digital measurement. Most companies use third-party trackers to measure and monetize. But the coming impact is so severe that Google’s own research suggests that publishers will lose 64% of revenue after third-party cookies are gone.

That’s why we’re thrilled to announce a $3 million seed round for our customer data platform that solves data loss and builds trust by capturing and activating customer data in your own infrastructure.

From our CEO, Mandar Shinde:

There’s a real opportunity for independent players like Blotout to play a role in customer data management by taking on outdated and untrustworthy multi-tenant platforms while providing the same ease of SaaS.”

The round was led by First Rays Venture Partners and includes Y Combinator, Pascal Capital, Launchpad Capital, and Sung Ho Choi (co-founder of fuboTV).

According to Alok Nandan, Partner at First Rays Ventures,

It is a reality of this decade that technological innovation is outpacing privacy protections, creating a mandate to include privacy as a central component of your overall security posture. First Rays firmly believes in the thesis that leaders are looking at data privacy as one of the top 3 areas of investment. Blotout enables trustworthy data journeys for consumers. I’m excited for Blotout that enables us to build an internet that we can trust.”

Enabling customer data management via Infrastructure as code

An enterprise today needs engineering and legal expertise nearing seven figures in cost and months of work to properly build their own customer data infrastructure. Blotout meets that need with infrastructure as-code that deploys a lossless, compliant, and trusted platform in five minutes to any of 250+ data centers around the world.

At the enterprise CDN edge, Blotout gives you no-code tech that collects, processes, and analyses data while ensuring compliance on a region-by-region basis (before data is shared or used). Our serverless infra-as-code solution deploys as your infrastructure, letting you accurately capture and process every customer data point, giving you lifetime customer journeys based on relationships of trust.

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This opens new possibilities like 100% measurement accuracy, marketing attribution, server-side data activation, online and offline customer journeys, and clean rooms for advertising. Within a trusted framework, you no longer use third-party measurement stacks from companies like Google or Twilio because you have those capabilities in-house.

A trusted relationship comes with obligations and we built Blotout to get that right from the start: it only captures consented data, audits every interaction, and ensures that usage follows the purpose limitations that users agreed to.

Blotout lets you harness the power of your data without compromising user trust.

What’s next

Our customers are companies like Razer and Uphold who understand that the future of martech and customer engagement will be predicated on trust and a one-to-one relationship with users. By going with Blotout, they’re turning that fact into a competitive advantage.

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