Stirista raises $13 million to grow its advertising databases

Marketing solutions provider Stirista today announced that it raised $13 million, which it plans to put toward “relevant” acquisitions and the expansion of its leadership team. It comes as the company — which counts Great Clips, Weight Watchers, Aol, Oracle, and Verizon among its customers — experiences double-digit growth for the 11th year in a row.

Data-driven marketing, which is Stirista’s specialty, entails the collection and analysis of data to inform ad strategies. It’s become commonplace in the industry, with 78% of marketers saying it’s embedded or strategic within their organization, according to a Teradata-published survey. Speed is one of the highest-cited benefits of data-driven marketing, followed by improved reporting and increased revenue, and practitioners assert that it enables companies to deliver more relevant communications to their customers.

Stirista provides tools like Scout, which lets marketers search LinkedIn for prospects and then shows fine-grained contact information from a database of 30 million people. And for a one-time fee, a rental, or the purchase of a license, the company offers enhancement services that give companies database resources by appending things like firmographic information (e.g., revenue and the number of employees) and demographics (lifestyle and purchase data).

Stirista also maintains and cleanses those customers’ databases, spreadsheets, and contact lists, adding missing items like ZIP codes, carrier routes, delivery point codes, suite numbers, and apartment numbers automatically. Beyond business and consumer data, the firm keeps political records like voter registration and donation history spanning two decades, with information on culture, religion, interests, political positions, and hundreds of other data points within detailed voter profiles. And it ostensibly tracks over 7 million culturally affiliated names with “high coverage and accuracy.”

Stirista has a social media engagement database — SocialORE — that grows as it crawls the web daily. The company claims it contains information on 75 million Americans and 150 million international social media users, as well as 75 million business-to-business and 60 million business-to-consumer social handles that can be appended to existing files.

On the backend, Stirista’s linking technology corroborates data from hundreds of sources including proprietary corpora, observed campaign metadata, and partner data sets. A corroborating process helps to link fields together to create identities inclusive of personal and professional details. Every record within the company’s repositories is time-, date-, and source-stamped so that it’s evident where it came from. Postal addresses, individual names, phone numbers, and emails are standardized and validated by third-party services to ensure accuracy.

Stirista also says it’s developed internal tools powered by AI to automate the delivery of customer insights — tools that the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Politico, and others have used for the purpose of research and understanding audiences and trends. “[With] AI, we can detail the effectiveness of a customer journey via a single-use coupon and can also understand web traffic with a proprietary tool called Visitor ID Graph,” a spokesperson said via email. “We call it Google Analytics on steroids because the insights can be leveraged and activated across all channels. Stirista has access to billions of data points and has developed thousands of advanced online and offline models using … data mining, AI, and algorithms.”

Stirista customers can sort through data within the data sets using over 400 filters, segmenting not only by age, gender, and ethnicity but by investments, donations by cause, interests, job title, revenue, and political views and other fields. Alternatively, they can leverage it to fill in missing email addresses before sending out email blasts, or to correct out-of-date addresses and create custom audience segments on social media.

For customers in need of a fully managed solution, Stirista offers a campaign creation service that handles design, testing, analytics, and reporting. It delivers ads across thousands of websites and builds a custom audience for a given campaign’s needs, and it keeps tabs on the campaign with real-time stats, making adjustments as necessary. Stirista says its campaigns have a 60% success rate on average.

Wavecrest Growth Partners led this latest financing round in Stirista with participation from investor Dennis Ainge. It’s the San Antonio-based company’s first public external raise since its founding in 2009, and one of its first press engagements after acquiring push notification startup PushWizard to enhance its marketing database with mobile ad targeting identifiers.