According to Dataships, the new funds will support the company in three main areas: product innovation, market expansion and customer success.

Dublin-based data privacy software and services company Dataships announced today (9 January) that it has secured €6.8m to support merchants in growing marketing lists.

Founded in 2019 by co-CEOs Michael Storan and Ryan McErlane, a year after GDPR came into force, Dataships is co-located at NexusUCD in Dublin and in San Francisco, California, and currently employs 25 people. The company provides a software-as-a-service (SaaS) tool which automates data privacy compliance across jurisdictions and aims to take the complexity out of privacy policies, cookie consent tools, GDPR and CCPA and make compliance simple for SMEs.

Following the Series A funding round, which was led by Osage Ventures Partners and featured participation from Lavrock Ventures and the Urban Innovation Fund, Dataships will use the newly acquired funds to accelerate its mission to help merchants dramatically grow their marketing lists and drive revenue growth, all while maintaining complete data privacy compliance.

Dataships aims to use the funding to support itself in three main areas: product innovation, by developing new features in order to unlock increased audience growth while maintaining compliance; market expansion, by bringing its tool to more segments of the e-commerce ecosystem; and customer success, by scaling its engineering and support teams in an effort to serve its growing merchant base.

Expressing his optimism for the company’s future, Storan said: “We’re building Dataships to be the essential growth platform for modern e-commerce brands; one that transforms compliance from a burden into a competitive advantage, helping merchants build larger, more engaged marketing lists that drive sustainable revenue growth.”

McErlane added that since the company has focused on the e-commerce market, it has discovered “something extraordinary”.

“When done right, compliance isn’t just about protection, it’s about growth,” McErlane explained. “By dynamically optimising consent language at the checkout, based on visitor location and marketing channel, we’re helping merchants achieve remarkable results in terms of increased opt-in rates, marketing contacts, and additional revenue generated through repeat purchases.”

He added that this “one-size-fits-all approach of most consent collection set-ups at checkout” can cause problems.

“It usually either has too high of a standard for compliance, which loses opt-ins, or too low a standard for compliance, which poses compliance risks.”

McErlane asserted that Dataships’ platform solves this by being “the only solution that guarantees both list growth and compliance at checkout”.

Dataships previously featured in SiliconRepublic.com’s Start-up of the Week series back in 2021. At the time, Storan said that the team set out “to change the way companies and individuals alike think about personal data”.

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