- The startup Narrative has raised $8.5 million in a Series A funding round.
- Narrative wants to shake up how marketers buy and sell data and is rolling out a new tool that promises to cut down on the amount of time it takes to make a sale.
- Narrative wants to replace data brokers by providing marketers more transparency in the process of buying data.
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The startup Narrative wants to make buying and selling data easier for marketers.
As more marketers look to navigate data privacy laws like the California Consumer Privacy Act that put restrictions on how data is collected and used, Narrative is one of handful of firms that sells software that companies use to transparently buy and sell data.
The marketing-tech firm has raised $8.5 million in a Series A funding round led by new investor G20 Ventures and previous investors Glasswing Ventures and MathCapital. The five-year-old company has raised a total of $14 million.
Narrative wants to remove middlemen from buying and selling data
The startup is also rolling out a new tool to speed up how marketers buy data that mimics an e-commerce website.
Narrative runs a marketplace where companies buy and sell data. Its new tool lets marketers view different sets of data to buy — like data pulled from brands' apps — and see which companies supplied the data. Marketers then pick how much data they want to buy based on a budget and receive it an hour, CEO Nick Jordan said. Narrative makes money by collecting a portion of the money.
"The goal was really to massively simplify how easy it is for people to get their hands on the data they need to run their business," he said.
Jordan said that the new tool and funding are part of the company's bigger goal of making it faster and easier for companies to buy and sell data. Traditionally, companies work with multiple departments including marketing and business development to buy data. Narrative also wants to remove data brokers from the process of buying and selling data. Data brokers are companies that sit between advertisers and tech firms and do not typically disclose where data comes from or how much money they take from sales.
"Data brokers are incentivized for the process to be hard because if the process is hard, you need them — if it's easy, you don't need them anymore," Jordan said. "They are the ones that ultimately get squeezed here because they rely on it being very hard to buy and sell data."
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