Data startup Sincera raises $4.2 million in seed funding

Sincera,  a media telemetry service helping companies accelerate their competitive velocity, announced that it has raised $4.2 million in a seed funding round led by NetView Ventures. Aperiam Ventures, LiveRamp Ventures, and The Trade Desk’s TD7 venture group also participated in the round. 

Launched in early 2022 by Mike O’Sullivan and Ian Meyers, Sincera’s primary function is to extract comprehensive insights from the code on a specific webpage. These insights encompass a wide range of details, including the proper collection of consent, the presence of various identity providers, attention-based targeting, the quantity and frequency of ad slots, and virtually any other relevant information within the webpage’s code.

As part of their investment, The Trade Desk will join forces with Sincera to co-create a cutting-edge Made-for-Advertising (MFA) detection model aimed at industry leadership.

“Sincera is pioneering the use of metadata to make the Open Internet better.  The Trade Desk is using Sincera’s product to accelerate our MFA and inventory quality controls.  This not only makes the Open Internet better In terms of higher quality inventory, price discovery, and transparency, but it also helps the Open Internet perform better,” said Jeff Green, CEO and co-founder of The Trade Desk. 

Additionally, a team of accomplished angel investors is contributing to the funding round, such as Jonah Goodhart (renowned for his work with Moat), Ari Papari,  Auren Hoffman (the founder of LiveRamp), and Dave Yaffe (who successfully sold his data startup, Arbor, to LiveRamp in 2016).

“We think of Sincera as the ‘Pentium’ to our customer’s first PC – using our advanced signals and tools, we allow our customers to build world class, next generation products without the overhead of vertically developing the entire offering. This way, we don’t compete with our customers – Intel doesn’t sell a PC – and we both share in the success of their products,” said Mike O’Sullivan, the CEO and co-founder of Sincera.   

To effectively handle incoming customer interactions, Sincera intends to allocate a portion of the seed round funding to expand the engineering and analyst team.

“Sincera’s metadata engine is not actually designed to collect insights for today’s problems – although it does that very well – it’s designed to let you define and collect any metric you want.  The product is constructed assuming that the digital advertising ecosystem will continue to grow and dramatically change,” said  Ian Meyers, one of Sincera’s co-founders.