Two key players in the consent management space are merging.
On Tuesday, French consent management platform (CMP) Didomi announced its acquisition of Sourcepoint, a CMP that started in 2015 as an anti-ad-blocking solution for publishers.
Since then, Sourcepoint evolved into a privacy platform with an emphasis on compliance and consent, which brought it into direct competition with Didomi.
The companies have been close rivals for years, but they “share the same vision,” Romain Gauthier, Didomi’s CEO and founder, told AdExchanger.
“We both believe that privacy is fundamental and it’s an important problem that the industry needs to solve,” Gauthier said. “That’s the bottom line.”
Two acquisitions in two months
Didomi financed its acquisition of Sourcepoint – Gauthier declined to share the exact deal price – with backing from Marlin Equity Partners, a PE firm that bought an $83 million majority stake in Didomi several months ago to accelerate the company’s international expansion and support M&A.
Sourcepoint is Didomi’s second acquisition in as many months.
In April, Marlin also backed Didomi’s purchase of Addingwell, a server-side tagging startup that helps companies securely manage their data collection.
That’s a lot of dealmaking in a short period of time, but don’t call it a spree, according to Gauthier.
“There are parts of our product offering that could perhaps benefit from further acquisitions, so we’ll stay opportunistic,” he said. “But we don’t have anything else planned for the time being.”
Instead, the plan is to take their time building a single unified platform that combines Didomi’s and Sourcepoint’s tech and to do it slowly over the next two years so as to create as little disruption as possible for clients.
And with respect to their customers, there’s virtually no overlap in their respective client rosters. Didomi works with around 1,500 companies across Europe and Canada, and Sourcepoint has more than 200 enterprise customers in the US, UK and Germany.
Privacy for the enterprise
Big enterprise companies, in particular, have been largely “underserved” by the data privacy software landscape, because their needs are especially complex, said Brian Kane, COO and co-founder of Sourcepoint.
“When it comes to personal data, there just aren’t really solutions out there that solve their privacy problems,” Kane said.
Large companies collect a lot of personal data, and they operate across multiple geographies with different regulations, which means they need privacy compliance tech that’s able to scale across regions and adapt to changing laws and requirements.
But they also need to strike a balance between privacy protection and performance, Gauthier said.
“Extracting value out of data, monetizing data for a publisher, making sense of data – these are critical questions for businesses,” he said, “and they need to be attacked with privacy in mind.”
Putting the ‘AI’ in ‘privacy’
These questions are also informing Didomi’s product road map, which now includes a greater focus on AI (because, of course).
In the near term, the idea is to use AI to add more utility and “basic tooling” to the combined platform, Kane said.
One example is a feature that would essentially allow clients to vibe code their own consent experiences. Didomi and Sourcepoint are already working on it, and it could be ready for release as soon as later this quarter.
Eventually, though, they’ll start working on more sophisticated solutions, Kane said, like a tool that automatically determines the level of risk associated with different AI models.
Both companies already have their own diagnostic tools that identify and report on potential compliance issues related to tracking tech, like when cookies and pixels are fired before consent. The AI risk tool would be the next evolution of this offering.
But even further down the line, that sort of tool could also be used to monitor how an AI agent handles data when it’s talking to another agent.
That one’s more of a long-term vision thing, though.
Still, enterprise companies are starting to get on board with agent-to-agent communication, Gauthier said, and the protocols for these types of transactions are already being built and worked on.
“It may sound like science fiction right now, but AI is changing everything so fast,” he said. “And so, if we want to make sure that privacy is embedded in this agent-to-agent world, we need to start now by doing the research and influencing these protocols today.”
