French startup Didomi has raised a $40 million Series B funding round led by Elephant and Breega. The company manages consent flows for web publishers and app developers. Didomi is already doing well in Europe with billions of consent interactions per month — it plans to expand to the U.S. with today’s funding round.
“Jawad, Raphaël and I have co-founded Didomi to make privacy easier for everyone and an obvious choice for companies. This fundraising is a major milestone on our journey to deliver on this mission,” co-founder and CEO Romain Gauthier said in a statement.
“We look forward to helping brands and publishers make customer journeys more transparent and trustworthy through a delightful consent and preferences management experience,” he added.
In recent years, many regulators have implemented new privacy-focused frameworks. You might think about GDPR in Europe for instance.
And if you live in a country that is affected by those changes, you are now well aware that you’ll get a consent popup or banner whenever you visit a new website or open an app for the first time.
I wouldn’t say that these popups are “delightful” as the best consent popup is the one that doesn’t exist because the site you’re visiting doesn’t collect and share personal data. But that’s not always possible and there are different reasons why you may need to collect data — including on this current site techcrunch dot com.
In that case, a product like Didomi can be really helpful. Taking those consent flows seriously is extremely important as you don’t want to mess up the implementation and get fined. Didomi is a developer-focused consent platform that works across many different devices. You can configure your consent flow for a desktop website, a mobile website, a mobile app or a connected TV.
Having a unified solution also means that you don’t have to ask for permission over and over again. Didomi can store and synchronize preferences across devices. Everything is auditable in case regulators want to see how you’re collecting consent.
With today’s funding round, the company wants to make its product even more developer friendly with open APIs and open-source SDKs. It doesn’t mean that Didomi is for everyone as the company focuses on premium clients in particular. Clients include Rakuten, Orange, Giphy and Weight Watchers International.
The company will also hire more people with local marketing and sales teams for different markets. Didomi plans to open offices in Germany, Spain and the U.S.
At the same time, the landscape is quickly evolving. Web browsers are gradually blocking third-party trackers and Apple now even asks you if an app can track you at the operating system level. It’s going to be interesting to see how Didomi evolves with user expectations.
