Big news for The Startup Factory comes in the form of its first ‘exit:”
Arcametrics, which focuses on predictive modeling, is now part of Adroit Digital.
“We are pretty psyched that two and a half years (after launch) we have our first exit,” say TSF’s co-founders Dave Neal and Chris Heivly.
Not only does an exit provide a possible financial payoff for TSF (financial terms of the deal we’re disclosed) but it also – and perhaps most importantly – gives a boost to the accelerator’s credibility.
To bring a new team to commercialization, financing, growth and exit in such a quick time span just might help TSF draw more talented teams of applicants for its six-month program which includes $50,000 in startup cash and a note to potentially provide more capital.
Adroit announced the deal last week.
Arcametrics was among the first “cohort” – Heivly’s term for startups selected to each of two rounds per year. And its team aimed high from the start, announcing plans at its TSF graduation to raise $1 million.
Led by Robert Brown, a professor at Duke, and Brad Davis, with experience in banking from Mastercard, Arcametrics left TSF after graduating in 2012 for New York. TSF helped the team find and hire a CEO (Paolo DiVincenzo), and then came the Adroit deal.
(By the way, heivly says that wasn’t all the good news: “In addition, one of our companies (Hostel Rocket) last week closed a significant over-subscribed funding round.”)
Adroit Digital says it has developed “the industry’s largest pool of shared shopper data to drive marketing results for global agencies and brands.”
Arcametrics technology provides “predictive modeling assets” to the mix, creating what Adroit calls the “Marketing Collective.”
“Using Arcametrics’ proprietary correlation and pattern recognition technology, the Marketing Collective will offer digital advertisers unprecedented first-party consumer insights and predictive modeling based on more than 400 million anonymized consumer profiles and 100 million deidentified unique buyers currently collected monthly by Adroit Digital, resulting in 7.65 trillion possible audience combinations,” Adroit said in the announcement.
“The audience models will be activated across all digital media channels to drive increased personalization and performance at scale.”
DiVincenzo will join Adroit as part of the deal.
“Our modeling engine technology is incredibly smart, but when it’s coupled with Adroit Digital’s truly unique pool of first-party commerce data and the company’s access to real-time media, our digital marketing capabilities and reach are amplified beyond anything on the market today,” said DiVincenzo, who will be vice president of Data Products. “The Arcametrics team is looking forward to joining the Adroit Digital family and embarking on a new journey in pursuit of helping marketers attain their goals in the ever-shifting digital landscape.”
Jacob Ross, president of Adroit, says adding Arcametrics boosts his company’s ability to help clients find customers.
“Currently in the industry, true commerce data exists in a highly fragmented state at a time when consumer attention is increasingly directed online. There are also a handful of closed systems becoming increasingly dominant. Our clients are able to leverage a large-scale, rich pool of shared, anonymized consumer data to solve this critical problem,” he explained in the announcement.
“We’ve aggregated what we believe is the largest quality set of shared first-party data from top advertisers that can be further enriched to create highly performant pools of addressable audiences. With the acquisition of Arcametrics, the speed and capacity of our modeling capability will reach new levels of sophistication to help our clients attract and retain their valuable customers at scale. I’m thrilled to welcome the Arcametrics team to Adroit Digital.”
Is there any doubt TSF is thrilled as well?
