Data consent and preferences management platform Didomi raises $40M

Consent and preferences management platform Didomi has raised $40 million in a series B round of funding.

Founded out of Paris in 2017, Didomi works with major enterprises including Rakuten, Orange, and Adevinta to help them manage user consent to run analytics, A/B testing, and other digital marketing initiatives.

Didomi’s consent management platform is designed to help companies collect, store, and manage users’ consent choices around the world, while its preference center enables businesses to offer users access to their personal data and update their preferences if they change their mind on previous permissions they submitted.

Developers can integrate Didomi through a number of ways, including software developer kits (SDKs), application programming interfaces (APIs), and pre-built connectors for the likes of Adobe, Google, HubSpot, and the Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

“The company has been built from the ground up as an open and flexible platform, which is particularly important when you are building and maintaining your privacy tech stack,” Didomi CEO and cofounder Romain Gauthier told VentureBeat.

So, what’s the number one problem Didomi solves for enterprises?

“Centralizing consent and preference statuses in one place, across all employee, user, or consumer touchpoints, in a technically reliable and simple way,” Gauthier said. “With such a system in place, they can drive growth while staying compliant and respect their consumers’ privacy choices.”

Protection

A recent Gartner report suggested that by 2023, 65% of the world’s population’s data will be “protected” by local or regional privacy regulations similar to Europe’s GDPR or CCPA in California. The consent management market was pegged as a $317 million industry in 2020 and is estimated to more than double in value within four years, with Didomi rivals such as OneTrust and BigID raising gargantuan funding rounds at mammoth valuations in anticipation of this surge.

“Demand is [being] driven by a combination of needs that stem from compliance, marketing and IT departments,” Gauthier said. “While consent and preference management — in the early days — was mostly driven by regulation and compliance professionals, it is now a main priority for IT and marketing departments that understand that it is of key importance in their zero- and first-party data strategies. More consent means more revenue.”

Moreover, consultants have also caught on to this trend, according to Gauthier, and are now advising their enterprise clients that privacy-first marketing and data strategies are vital.

While Didomi operates in an increasingly crowded field, Gauthier believes his company has a few things in its favor, including its unique focus on a specific privacy vertical. OneTrust, for example, offers a range of privacy management products from AI-powered redaction to benchmarking.

“Didomi is the only player that is entirely focused on consent and preference management without seeking to offer a whole range of solutions related to privacy management,” Gauthier said. “This has allowed us to go much deeper in terms of product capabilities and features to help our clients solve their consent and preference management challenges.”

While Didomi was founded in Europe where — due to GDPR — “privacy laws are more stringent and often more specific,” the company is very much vying for the U.S. market, where its CTO and cofounder Jawad Stouli is based. This has allowed Didomi to sign up U.S. clients such as Giphy, Tron TV, and UKG, and it’s currently gearing up to open a New York office in the next couple of months.

Prior to now, Didomi had raised $6 million, and it has been profitable since its first year in business. With another $40 million in the bank from U.S. and European investors including Elephant and Breega, the company is setting out to bolster its preference management platform.

“Didomi’s vision is to offer a self-service platform to its clients, who are asking for a simple consent and preference management tool that can be deployed across various channels  — web, mobile, apps, connected TV — and act as a central, continuously updated ‘vault’ of user permissions for the company,” Gauthier said. “By adding new channels like email or push notifications to its Preference Management Platform, Didomi will help marketers in many industries to understand and manage their users’ preferences to be compliant and drive revenue at the same time.”