Dstillery, the marketing company formerly known as Media6Degrees, is announcing that it has raised $24 million in Series C funding.
This basically doubles Dstillery’s total funding. It raised a Series B almost four years ago — in fact, CEO Tom Phillips told me that the company was approaching profitability and hadn’t intended to raise more money at all. However, he said Dstillery decided to pursue new funding because of a big opportunity on the mobile side of the business.
The initial vision, Phillips said, was “finding the signal from a massive quantity of web browsing data.” In other words, it can look at the browsing behavior that sets a business’ customers apart from the general population, and it can help marketers target ads based on that data. With the acquisition of Everyscreen Media last year, the company expanded its capabilities to include mobile and cross-device targeting.
That effort has dramatically expanded the data that Dstillery is analyzing, Phillips said — the company went from looking at 8 to 9 billion events a day to examining 22 billion events a day. So far, its mobile efforts have focused on location data. The next step is to start analyzing in-app behavior, and to expand beyond the United States.
“Those 22 billion events a day in the US are a critical part of our value proposition,” Phillips said. “To do what we do in the U.K., or Germany, or Japan, or wherever, we want to have a full view. To take on that full view actually requires a material investment in infrastructure.”
The Series C was led by NewSpring Capital, with investment from previous backers U.S. Venture Partners, Menlo Ventures, and Venrock. NewSpring’s Mike DiPiano is joining the company’s board of directors.
Dstillery also says revenue grew 50 percent year-over-year in the first half of 2014, while its headcount grew by 40 percent.
