Company Name:
Dataseat Ltd.
Date Founded:
January 2019
Business Type:
Mobile App DSP (demand side platform)
Location:
London, United Kingdom
Managing Director:
David Philippson – Founder & CEO
David Philippson is the co-founder and CEO of Dataseat, which was acquired by Verve Group in July 2022. David has over a decade of ad tech experience, focusing on data, attribution, and programmatic advertising. David founded AD-X Tracking, one of the first mobile app attribution companies now known as MMPs. AD-X Tracking was acquired by Criteo in 2013. David became Criteo’s general manager of mobile solutions, responsible for building one of the industry’s first in-app retargeting businesses. David is also an active investor and advisor to many other ad-tech startups, including Ad-lib Digital (acquired by Smartl.io), Luna Labs (acquired by ironSource), and, most recently, Aequus (acquired by Moloco).
Key Staff:
- Dr. Paul Hayton – Co-Founder & CTO (David’s previous co-founder AD-X, ex-Criteo)
- Alessandro Giuliani – Commercial Director (ex-Liftoff, ex-Criteo)
- Ben Robin – VP Sales EMEA (ex-Moloco)
- Dr. Matina Thomaidou – VP Data Science (ex-Facebook)
Number of Employees:
25
Social Media Links:
Main Areas Of Business:
- Demand Side Platform
- Contextual privacy-compliant advertising
- Casual gaming is our core addressable market
Elevator pitch:
In 2017, Apple made its first major move in privacy, implementing ITP (intelligent tracking prevention) which limited first- and third-party cookies in the Safari browser. David became convinced that this was the precursor to Apple removing the IDFA from the iOS operating system.
Ad network performance during this time was largely driven by user profiling and behavioural-based bidding where ad networks harvested IDFA data from their advertisers and publishers, allowing them to know consumer likes, dislikes, and intent. This practice was often done without user consent, and it was obvious this went against Apple’s desire for increased consumer privacy.
Dataseat was born in January 2019 based on the thesis that if IDFA would disappear then privacy-compliant contextual-based advertising would become the norm. Dataseat is a fully transparent, privacy-compliant contextual DSP whose mission is to drive performance for mobile gaming companies and other app advertisers for user acquisition and re-engagement. Dataseat was acquired in July 2022 and is now part of Verve Group.
Highlights / Greatest achievement So Far:
Within a 2.5-year timeline Dataseat predicted the most significant industry disruption caused by IDFA deprecation, built a contextual machine learning-based bidder/DSP from scratch, raised £2.75 million of venture capital, launched the new product, found product market fit, scaled to $20 million (USD), and was acquired — all during a global pandemic.
Tell us something about you that nobody really knows about:
David runs a charity to support armed forces personnel that are injured in action. It is named in memory of his late brother.