Sincera, a startup that uses metadata to help adtech companies improve their offerings, just raised a $4.2 million seed round.
The New York-based company, founded in 2022, offers a telemetry service that crawls websites to determine everything that is informing the ad transactions that take place there.
Much like a secret shopper visits a retail store, Sincera imitates a real user and can help adtech companies analyze, for example, the types of technology a publisher is using to identify its readers or whether the site is compliant with local privacy laws.
Sincera Cofounder Mike O'Sullivan met his fellow cofounder Ian Meyers when he was leading product at the supply-side platform Index Exchange, which was partnering with data platform LiveRamp, where Meyer was leading its identity solution. The pair stayed in touch and would work on thorny, laborious, and often unglamorous adtech problems "at nights and weekends for fun," O'Sullivan said. Over time, they realized there was a business in this work.
"We're like Mike Rowe of 'Dirty Jobs,' the guy who goes on the Discovery Channel who looks at what it's like to be a sewer inspector — that's what we are of adtech," O'Sullivan told Insider.
The origin of the name Sincera came from a folk tale O'Sullivan's father would tell him when he was younger about about the etymology of the word "sincere." After Greek cities had been plundered, Roman bazaars would often sell statues. But weeks after people had taken them home, the statues would start to melt because they had been patched up with wax. So, the story goes, some stall holders would display signs saying "sine" — meaning "without" in Latin — "cera," the word for wax to demonstrate the quality of their sculptures.
"There was a truthfulness we thought was lacking in the dialog of much of the industry and also how products were being used and made," O'Sullivan said.
Sincera intends only to work with adtech companies and instead charges a monthly fee for access to its data and some additional processing fees. Customers to date have included LiveRamp, identity company ID5, and publicly traded adtech company The Trade Desk.
Sincera's seed round was led by NextView Ventures. AperiamVentures, LiveRamp Ventures, and The Trade Desk's TD7 venture fund also participated.
Sincera plans to invest the fresh funds in expanding its current team of nine to around 14, with intentions to hire heads of sales, go-to-market strategy, customer analysis, and in its engineering team. It plans to invest the remainder in compute as it grows its customer base and begins to crawl more data in areas like in-app advertising and connected-TV.
Check out the key slides from the pitch deck that helped Sincera raise its $4.2 million seed funding round.