Six years ago, Tim Geenen co-founded Faktor, a consent management platform that was an early leader when privacy-based identity solutions for publishers blossomed after GDPR.
A few years later, Faktor was sold to LiveRamp, where Geenen spent almost three years leading privacy and addressability products in Europe.
This month, Geenen is back with a new startup called Rayn, which he hopes will be a similar standout when the market for “digital twins” becomes a real thing.
Rayn is led by many of the same co-founders and early leaders from Faktor. In the past two weeks, Geenen told AdExchanger the startup has raised about two-thirds of its goal for seed funding.
So, what’s a digital twin?
The idea of a digital twin is to create personas that function as amalgamations of how different people with similar preferences and online patterns think – or how they shop, to be specific.
“None of your customers is unique,” Geenen said.
No brand would ever be caught dead saying that about its own customers. But the point remains that it is possible to create sharp profiles of, say, women between 35 and 40 years old who are affluent, known shoppers of certain items and use specific social media networks.
Digital twin personas are created using first-party data as seed data, but once they’re up and running, so to speak, they don’t require personal data to be used for optimization.
And there is no identity matching required. “The whole idea of the synthetic is you can use it without having personal data attached to it, even though that was the origin,” Geenen said.
The digital twin is honed over time through social data collection products, similar to Sprinklr or Brandwatch, as well as by a brand’s own data via a customer data platform, CRM, user reviews and call center data collection. But it’s not an ID-based profile that must be matched to be targeted.
Geenen said the big step that takes the idea of a digital twin from neat buzzword to a real potential market solution is the crazy-fast development of generative AI products.
Data scientists use SQL, the language of big data, to run queries against data in Google BigQuery or other cloud databases to find out new things about a brand’s customers.
But with a generative AI application, a less technical creative agency exec or ecommerce marketer can ask questions of a software-based persona to generate interesting new results.
(But for now, these services, including Microsoft Bing’s search chat weirdo Sydney and Google Bard, are in their infancy.)
The forecast for Rayn
Geenen isn’t concerned that the market for digital twins hasn’t materialized yet.
The Rayn product team began development in January and will have the first alpha product shipped next month to a small number of clients to test and see how it works.
One of the things Rayn needs to understand, for instance, is the amount and types of data that are required to form digital twins with confidence in the output.
Initially, Rayn thought it would need large customers to start with because they have more first-party data to feed into the personas. “Along the way, we found that even companies with less data can be good enough to model off and to create synthetic audiences,” Geenen said.
Rayn’s first clients are creative agencies, which provide campaign strategy based on demographics or types of consumers.
Geenen is also planning to court clients in the travel and mobility space. Can a synthetic persona predict where its real-life lookalikes want to travel for vacation next year? Rayn wants to find out.
And one more early biz dev opportunity is ecommerce, so that Rayn can start to understand which types of customers are likely to churn and which are likely return.
“We feel like if we can do those three things,” Geenen said. “We are well on our way to expanding the idea to a much broader market.”
