Update 10/10/24: This article was originally published under the headline “HUMAN Raises $50 Million To Build A Deterministic ID For Attribution.” After publication, HUMAN said that the CEO misspoke about the company’s product development plans, and that HUMAN does not plan to build a proprietary ID of any kind, nor is it building a measurement and attribution solution.
HUMAN VP of Product Geoff Stupay clarified that HUMAN plans to use the $50 million investment to improve its ad fraud and click fraud detection capabilities by building closer integrations with platform partners. HUMAN will also build improved security features for platforms that use alternative IDs, to evaluate the methodology used by these ID solutions and to confirm adherence to industry standards.
The original story follows.
The measurement market is going to get a bit more crowded.
Ad fraud detection and verification company HUMAN announced Wednesday it raised more than $50 million in a growth funding round.
It will use the infusion of cash to evolve its ad fraud detection platform into a full-fledged measurement solution, with an emphasis on closed-loop attribution for ecommerce, said HUMAN CEO Stu Solomon. As part of this shift, it plans to build a deterministic ID from its tracking of more than 20 trillion digital signals per week across 3 billion devices, which will aid attribution.
“Your website, CTV, mobile app and gaming behaviors are all part of this ecosystem of data that is your persistent identification,” Solomon said.
Returning investors
The growth round was a smaller, more purposeful fundraising effort compared to HUMAN’s past funding rounds, deliberately aimed at building the SaaS measurement product and ID, Solomon said. “It allows us to go into logically tangential areas of the market we feel are being completely underserved.”
Solomon declined to tally up how much funding HUMAN has raised to date across HUMAN’s legacy business and the two companies it acquired in the past two years, PerimeterX and clean.io. Back in 2020, Goldman Sachs acquired White Ops (now rebranded to HUMAN), with plans to expand its ad fraud detection business and acquire more companies.
All of the investors in this growth round were past investors in the three companies. The round was led by WestCap, with contributions from Goldman Sachs, ClearSky, NightDragon and Vertex Ventures US.
The HUMAN team’s “leadership in the media security space has restored confidence in an increasingly complex digital landscape,” said Kevin Marcus, partner, Co-COO and head of strategic operators at WestCap, citing its commitment to transparency and accuracy for its clients.
HUMAN hopes to bring that reputation for transparency and security to its proposed measurement and ID solutions, Solomon said. And the amount of data HUMAN sees from its invalid traffic and click fraud detection efforts give it the scale to make those solutions work where others have failed, he added.
“Scale is inherently in the DNA of the company,” he said. “But the most important thing is confidence. Where any kind of risk scoring or universal ID breaks down is because you do black-box scoring and don’t show your work.”
Growth vectors
To bring its platform plans to fruition, HUMAN has to unify the data operations of the media/ad tech side of its business with the bot-mitigation-focused enterprise side into “a common data layer with common decisioning logic,” Solomon said.
Doing so will require investments in data infrastructure and machine learning, which the funding round will support. HUMAN is looking to build its platform through in-house development, rather than via acquisition, Solomon said.
Going the in-house route means growing HUMAN’s team of product engineers and data scientists. The company headcount currently tops 400 employees. Solomon declined to specify how many employees the company is looking to hire, but said to expect “meaningful” growth in engineering and data science. The company will also expand its sales team to a smaller extent as needed to support its growth, he said.
