Zeotap Scoops $42 Million as CrossFit’s Eric Roza Joins Board

Eric Roza, the incoming CEO of CrossFit, is joining customer analytics platform Zeotap’s board just as the company announced $42 million in fresh capital. The latest funding round follows a projected 431% growth in revenue over the past year, according to Zeotap.
“Zeotap is the most important data platform to emerge in years,” said Roza, who previously led data firms Datalogix and Oracle Data Cloud, in a statement.
The news comes a month after the German company announced ID+, its universal ad identity project—on which the recent funding will let Zeotap “double down” to help advertisers identify audiences amid expanding data privacy laws. 
In place of cookies or mobile identifiers, ID+ uses concealed phone numbers and email addresses to target consumers without compromising privacy, Zeotap founder and CPO Projjol Banerjea told Adweek. 
When asked what differentiates ID+ from competing offerings, Banerjea pointed to Zeotap’s global publisher footprint. Publishing companies like the International Business Times and Hearst—alongside regional publishers in Italy, Mexico and elsewhere—have already signed on to the project.
Still, Banerjea expects ID+ can co-exist with other solutions like LiveRamp’s IdentityLink. “We anticipate that the post-cookie world does not look like a monopoly in the context of identifiers. We believe there will be between three and five universal IDs that will replace the cookie and device IDs,” he said.
“Nobody wants to replace a duopoly in the form of Google and Facebook with just another duopoly,” Banerjea noted.
Zeotap CEO Daniel Heer told Adweek the firm’s longstanding compliance with Europe’s GDPR has eased the transition to California’s CCPA, the sweeping privacy law which began to be enforced this month. 
“In Europe, you need people to say ‘yes.’ In the U.S., it’s enough if you give people a technical way to say ‘no.’ It’s ex-ante versus ex-post,” explained Heer.