Serial ad tech entrepreneur Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan founded two startups roughly a decade apart. Both were motivated by a similar question.
“Could we democratize the notion of consumer identity in a way that is value-creating not only for the enterprise – marketers, publishers, media platforms, etc. – but also is respectful of the consumer,” Sivaramakrishnan says on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.
Her first startup was cross-device identity company Drawbridge, launched in 2011 and later sold to LinkedIn in 2019 for roughly $300 million. In 2022, Sivaramakrishnan co-founded data clean room startup Samooha with Abhishek Bhowmick, Apple’s former head of machine learning for privacy and cryptography.
One year later, cloud-based data platform Snowflake swooped in and acquired Samooha. Sivaramakrishnan is now Snowflake’s senior director of product management, where she leads the product vision and strategy for Snowflake Data Clean Rooms.
But to go back in time, one of the core ideas behind Drawbridge was to help marketers recognize their customers across devices without having to rely on the walled gardens, which are the keepers of most logged-in user data.
It became apparent over time, however, that there was a secondary challenge facing marketers and publishers. They also needed a way to securely share their identity data with each other and with other partners for campaign measurement and analysis – but without exposing any personally identifiable information.
That’s why Samooha was born and why the data clean room category writ large emerged, Sivaramakrishnan says, so as to create an easy way for two enterprises to securely share sensitive data.
Now that it’s a part of Snowflake, she and her team can work on scaling Samooha’s data collaboration technology into industries beyond marketing.
Health care is a good example. Hospital systems and insurance providers are covered entities under HIPAA and they often have to share health records that contain highly sensitive information.
There are also potential applications for financial services, retail or even threat detection to analyze user behavior on the ground at large events.
The opportunity to apply lessons learned from marketing and ad tech across these other industry use cases is a big part of what pushed Sivaramakrishnan and Bhowmick to sell Samooha so quickly.
“That’s certainly exciting for me and us at Samooha,” she says. “[It] drove a lot of the reason for the acquisition.”
Also in this episode: A stroll down cross-device Memory Lane, the rise of privacy-enhancing technologies, ad tech’s convergence with cloud technology and advice for women in tech. Plus: Sivaramakrishnan’s direct and personal connection to NASA’s New Horizons space mission, the first-ever voyage to the Pluto System and Kuiper Belt.
For more articles featuring Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan, click here.
