Zeotap monetises information for clients' targeted reach-out efforts

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Since Projjol Banerjea was passionate about technology and marketing, he began his journey by focusing on data for coming up with insight to reach out to customers in a better way, enabling the growth of organisations. Thus Banerjea formed Zeotap along with his friend Daniel Heer from Germany in 2014 to focus on data to come up with insights.

Interacting with DH, Banerjea says that Zeotap is a data platform that makes large-scale, deterministic data assets easily accessible to the digital advertising market, other industries and app developers for better decision-making.

“We use telecom data as a primary source of information, along with other social media platforms. This data can be the potential to become a powerful innovation engine across industry sectors, if it is extracted, refined and intelligently distributed,” says Banerjea.

He says that data has the capacity to transform the entire industrial landscape as oil did nearly hundred-and-fifty years ago. “Zeotap borrows its name from the oil industry’s most effective catalysts — zeolites. John D Rockefeller revolutionised the oil industry and made it possible by extracting it from crude oil through the refining method and distributed through the network that would reach end-users. Just as the Rockefeller company Standard Oil made him a successful US businessman, in the same way, we do hope that data will make us successful businessmen by making an impact on almost all industries,” Banerjea says.

The Zeotap platform has tied up with leading Mobile Network Operators (MNOs). “We capture premium data of customers and provide high-quality customer insights for digital marketers. Besides giving additional revenues for telecom service providers, we make value out of this. We have attracted large corporates from outside the telecom space to join this unique data platform,” he says.

Banerjea points out that a majority of data available in the market is of poor quality and it is less, as it is based on probabilistic modelling. “Here we have a wider range of reliable data, including demographics, locations and purchase intent. Besides focusing on data security and privacy aspects, Zeotap can monetise highest-quality data sources of companies across the ecosystem, especially in the areas of ecommerce, banking, healthcare, manufacturing, weather forecasting and agriculture, among others,” he adds.

When asked about data security and privacy aspects, Banerjea says, “We prevent advertisers from storing data with persistent identifiers. Also, there are strict rules that clients will have to adhere to while accessing information,” he says.

The company is currently backed by over $20 million from investors from three different continents. “We are thankful that the diversity of investors helps us in client mining. Our most prominent investors include Capnamic Ventures, IRIS Capital (Orange Telecom and Publicis), HERE, HitFox Group and New York-based venture capital fund New Science Ventures,” he says. Zeotap also received the first direct investment of AngelList in Europe.

The company has a technical centre in Bengaluru, and comprises more than two-thirds of its global headcount. “We have a lean team of around 50 people and are planning to double our technical team by the end of this year. We are also planning to hire more data engineers and data scientists,” he says.

Zeotap also has offices in New York, Madrid and Milan. Banerjea asserts that Zeotap would like to focus on India which has a population of over a billion and expects a sizeable explosion on the data front.