Latest funding round for Dataships support its strategy to turn compliance into a growth engine for e-commerce.
Irish data privacy software and services player Dataships has closed a €6.8m Series A funding round.
The company specialises in automating GDPR and CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) compliance for organisations.
“Since focusing on the e-commerce market, we’ve discovered something extraordinary, when done right, compliance isn’t just about protection, it’s about growth”
Led by Osage Venture Partners, with participation from Lavrock Ventures and the Urban Innovation Fund, the funding will accelerate the company’s mission to help merchants dramatically grow their marketing lists, and drive revenue growth, while maintaining complete data privacy compliance.
Dataships, founded in 2019 by Michael Storan and Ryan McErlane, is co-located at NexusUCD in Dublin and in San Francisco, California, and currently employs 25 people.
The privacy compliance-led future of e-commerce
According to co-founder and co-CEO Ryan McErlane, the e-commerce landscape has fundamentally shifted.
Rising customer acquisition costs, privacy regulations, and sky-high expectations on personalisation and communication have merchants searching for sustainable ways to grow.
He explained that Dataships was founded as a compliance tech company, but the team quickly realised that smarter compliance management is a massively untapped lever for growth.
“Most e-commerce brands follow a familiar playbook, drive traffic, offer discounts for email sign-ups, maybe test a traffic de-anonymizer, hope for purchases and remarket those that don’t. But this underutilises the most impactful and brief moment for building marketing lists, the checkout.
“Since focusing on the e-commerce market, we’ve discovered something extraordinary, when done right, compliance isn’t just about protection, it’s about growth.
“By dynamically optimizing consent language at the checkout, based on visitor location and marketing channel, we’re helping merchants achieve remarkable results in terms of increased opt-in rates, marketing contacts, and additional revenue generated through repeat purchases.”
“The one-size-fits-all approach of most consent collection setups at checkout can cause problems. It usually either has too high of a standard for compliance, which loses opt-ins, or too low a standard for compliance, which poses compliance risks.”
McErlane said that the Dataships platform solves this by being the only solution that guarantees both list growth and compliance at checkout. This is especially beneficial for multi-channel, multi-national brands that need to be able to serve different consent configurations for both email and SMS and for shoppers in different regions.”
Co-founder and co-CEO Michael Storan said the Series A funding secured by Dataships will support the company in three key areas: product innovation, market expansion and customer success.
“In today’s landscape where acquisition costs are still rising, personalization is expected, and privacy is a real concern from shoppers, merchants need more than just tactics, they need a systematic approach to expand reach and more meaningfully engage their highest-value audience, purchasers.
“We’re building Dataships to be the essential growth platform for modern e-commerce brands. One that transforms compliance from a burden into a competitive advantage, helping merchants build larger, more engaged marketing lists that drive sustainable revenue growth.”
Main image at top: Michael Storan and Ryan McErlane, founders and CEOs of Dataships
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