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We’re excited to announce the acquisition of Agnostik, a privacy tech startup providing data compliance automation services to organizations in the publishing and media industries.
Joining forces with the team of 13 specialized in privacy monitoring will strengthen Didomi’s compliance offering, allow our customers to maintain security standards over time and open the door for them to access industry-leading privacy certifications.
Navigating privacy in an ever-changing digital world
Over the past few years, we’ve seen a shift towards heightened concerns over data privacy. What started in 2018 in Europe with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has now become a global movement, and it’s only the beginning:
"By year-end 2023, 75% of the world’s population will have its personal data covered under modern privacy regulations, up from 25% today." - Gartner® Hype Cycle™ for Privacy, 2021
This regulatory trend has been accompanied by a surge in interest on the consumer side, with users increasingly favoring transparent and trustworthy digital experiences. In France and Germany, nearly 70% of consumers have decided to buy a product or service specifically because of supplier commitment to consumer privacy. In Ireland, that number reached 65%, and in the UK 60% of consumers.
As companies strive to both comply with lawmakers and satisfy their customers’ expectation of transparency, new demand has emerged for privacy monitoring solutions, whose role is to help brands maintain high privacy standards over time. Today, doing this can indeed turn into a herculean task when the digital technology stack spans various regulations and technologies.
As a result, data protection professionals are increasingly looking for complete, turnkey solutions to understand the risks associated with their digital marketing operations, and address the complex compliance issues that may arise across their apps and websites. In line with Didomi’s continued growth and focus on international expansion, incorporating Agnostik’s cutting-edge compliance automation technology into our offering is therefore a logical next step.
Agnostik: Simplifying privacy compliance and monitoring with automation
Since its creation in 2016, Agnostik’s team has been focused on providing tools and services to assess, improve and maintain organizations' highest privacy standards over time.
Providing simplicity in a highly complex field, Agnostik women and men have been designing tools and processes that allow perfect coordination between business, IT and legal teams, attracting a wide number of clients in sectors like media, retail and more. The startup has also successfully created and nurtured a unique community of senior media experts by involving them in the design and development of its solutions.
With a value proposition and expertise complementary to Didomi’s offering, Agnostik was a perfect candidate for an acquisition. Both Frank Ducret, the CEO of Agnostik, and Romain Gauthier, our CEO, have expressed their excitement towards the deal:
“We are excited and delighted to write a new chapter in the life of our company. Joining Didomi is the best choice to strengthen Agnostik's leadership in data privacy services, as we share the same ambition and dedication to innovation. This acquisition will significantly increase the value of our respective solutions for our customers, today and tomorrow. More native integrations and more automation will help our clients get the most out of their data protection investments. Publishers, advertisers, and marketing technology companies now have a one-stop-shop to maximize the ROI of their digital and ad operations, in full regulatory compliance.” - Frank Ducret, CEO of Agnostik
“I am extremely proud to announce the acquisition of Agnostik, which is widely recognized for their technological and privacy expertise, especially among European publishers and brand marketers. We can't wait to present our joint value proposition to our prospects and clients, as many of them face data privacy challenges that go beyond cookie consent management. Our synergies are exceptional, and we share a common vision of making a complex digital ecosystem more transparent and user-centric, fostering valuable trust through privacy.” - Romain Gauthier, CEO of Didomi
Joining forces to provide a complete privacy tech stack
One of the objectives behind our recent Series B fundraising round was to accelerate Didomi’s international growth and develop our service offering. Acquiring Agnostik allows us to offer an attractive compliance and privacy stack to our clients, improving Didomi’s current product in 3 key areas: Automation of compliance audits, access to privacy certifications and improving the return-on-investment of our clients’ privacy ad operations.
Simplifying privacy compliance with automation
As we know, some areas of compliance can become time-consuming, and would greatly benefit from automation. Specifically, vendor management involves a lot of different tasks, requiring perfect coordination between marketing, legal and business teams. Agnostik’s technology allows users to:
- Monitor and detect cookies and trackers
- Attach them to vendors
- Assess vendor risk profile with respect to regulatory compliance
- Notify any changes that require a change of configuration
- Automate configuration changes
For companies currently spending dozens of hours on manual audit and monitoring, this type of automation is a game changer.
Preparing users for privacy certifications
We’re seeing a lot of initiatives around privacy scores and labels appear, such as Little Systers and ISO 27701, helping internet users make more informed decisions about the companies they chose to trust.
Research shows that over one-third of consumers consider better privacy more important than lower prices. For companies striving to maintain impeccable privacy practices, certifications are a great opportunity to showcase that dedication and garner trust from customers.
By integrating Agnostik’s automated compliance and monitoring solutions to our platform, we will help our clients reach the highest levels of privacy certification. Indeed, these will require excellent privacy practices over time, something that would be very difficult to maintain manually.
Agnostik and Didomi become reliable partners to optimize privacy AdOps
This new field in digital advertising ensures that user privacy standards imposed by a brand are adequately followed throughout the advertising chain. Similar to brand safety, it verifies that brands are not associated with irregular privacy practices such as dark patterns or non-compliant implementations.
Privacy AdOps solutions can make the process of remaining compliant all along the advertising chain much easier by auditing it continuously with privacy trackers and bots.
Together, Agnostik and Didomi will redefine the way companies can implement, maintain and monitor their safety and compliance processes.
Both teams are excited to unite and bring the world our shared vision of making a complex digital ecosystem more transparent and user-centric, fostering valuable trust through privacy.
We look forward to presenting you with more details about our joint offering in the upcoming months. Stay tuned!
