iPerceptions acquires Datacratic’s ad tech side


In an attempt to strengthen its offering to marketers, iPerceptions has acquired the Datacratic brand in an all-Montreal deal.

MTLinTECH has learned that iPerceptions will gain Datacratic’s ad tech business and about 10 of its employees. Datacratic, meanwhile, will forge ahead under the name of its flagship product, MLDB, with CEO Jeremy Barnes and eight employees now completely focused on building out their machine learning database.

“It’s exciting,” said Barnes, who added that the financial details of the deal were confidential. “Datacratic had a business doing advertising technology as its own product and we had a separate technology called MLDB. MLDB was built based on the experience we had in the ad tech side of the business, but from a business perspective it’s completely different. Rather than try to develop these two businesses in parallel we decided to give the ad tech a home where it could develop as a more complete offering.”

The now slimmer MLDB team is one that Barnes calls “one of the most experienced machine learning teams in the country.”

“We kept a really, really strong machine learning team and now we’re 100 per cent devoted to that.”

iPerceptions is a customer experience analytics specialist while Datacratic is a machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) technology company. The startup called its now former ad business a leading real-time audience optimization and segmentation Ad Tech Suite.

“With the explosive growth in programmatic and personalization capabilities, brands are looking at new ways to maximize their marketing spend,” said iPerceptions CEO Martin Le Sauteur. “With this acquisition, iPerceptions will strengthen its capabilities in providing highly focused and accurate audience segments that our clients can use to engage with the right person at the right time, with the right message, improving campaign and conversion results.”

iPerceptions has previously received investment capital from Telesystem, XPND Capital and Wellington Financial. It now has nearly 100 employees working in Montreal and in New York.

Datacratic is backed by Canadian venture capital firms Real Ventures and BDC Venture Capital. The team was also one of four startups selected to the InnoCité accelerator program’s newest cohort, sponsored by the city of Montreal. There MLDB will work with data resources provided by the city, particularly concerning geographical and imaging data.

The startup’s Ad Tech business has long standing partnerships with advertising technology market leaders such as Oracle (Blukai) and others. In particular, the integration with Oracle Data Cloud and Marketing Cloud will allow iPerceptions to push its audience segments directly into their systems helping its users to reach a new level of precision and accuracy in audience targeting.

“The deal takes the shackles off MLDB and lets us go forward with our vision,” said Barnes. “When you have success in not just one vertical market it kind of constrains development. We’ve been able to step back and look at the right direction and we have some exciting things coming with MLDB.”

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