Didomi, a French scale-up that develops globally- adopted software solutions to manage user consent and preferences, is announcing the acquisition of Agnostik, a privacy tech start-up which allows organizations to ensure high data privacy practices. By doing so, Didomi strengthens its compliance offering, helping companies who seek to thrive in a complex digital ecosystem fueled by personal data, without losing the trust of their users. Both companies have been successfully collaborating for years to help their joint clients improve the compliance of marketing and advertising.
Didomi announces the acquisition of Agnostik, a Paris-based startup whose expertise in data privacy and compliance services will complement Didomi’s existing offerings. By joining forces with Agnostik, integrating its technologies and talents, Didomi will be able to better address their clients’ most pressing and complex challenges around data compliance.
Since its creation in 2016, Agnostik’s team has been focused on providing tools and services to assess, improve and maintain organizations’ highest privacy standards over time. Providing simplicity in a highly complex field, Agnostik women and men have been designing tools and processes that allow perfect coordination between business, IT and legal teams, attracting a wide number of clients in sectors like media, retail and more. The startup has also successfully created and nurtured a unique community of senior media experts by involving them in the design and development of its solutions.
Consumers will trust brands that respect privacy, regardless of the complexities
Over the years, companies all over the world have shifted from discovery to maturity when it comes to the importance of privacy. What started in Europe with GDPR today is a global movement towards more transparency when it comes to personal data usage, particularly in the digital and advertising industries. But this simple idea of compliance can be of immense complexity when it comes to actual implementation.
One example is digital vendor management, which remains painful as it requires perfect coordination between marketing, legal and business teams. Many companies would relish having access to a simple way to (1) monitor and detect trackers, (2) attach them to vendors, (3) assess vendor risk profiles with respect to regulatory compliance, (4) notify any changes that require a change of configuration, and (5) to automate configuration changes.
With the acquisition of Agnostik, Didomi adds useful privacy monitoring solutions to its current offering. Agnostik’s product allows publishers and marketers to automatically monitor their websites and detect specific compliance gaps. They will receive email alerts of any privacy issue detected and be able to resolve this issue directly in their consent notice configuration.
This will save them countless hours of manual website audits and team meetings to assess whether the initial consent configuration is still up to date on a given website. For publishers and marketers running thousands of pages on dozens of websites, this will put an end to the idea that this problem couldn’t be solved. This will enable its clients to build trustworthy and transparent user experiences, while maintaining high privacy standards across the digital value chain.
Didomi will help its clients succeed in privacy certifications and brand safety
The world’s biggest brands have recognized that investing in privacy builds valuable trust. In that context, there are an increasing number of initiatives – such as privacy scores or labels – to help internet users be more informed about the privacy stance of brands. By bringing Agnostik’s expertise in-house, Didomi’s clients will be able to future-proof their data strategies, reaching the highest levels of certification, and to maintain them over time.
Companies will also have access to expert advice in Privacy Ad Operations (a.k.a. Privacy AdOps), which ensures that user privacy standards imposed by a brand are adequately followed by the whole digital advertising chain. Similar to brand safety, it allows them to avoid being associated with irregular privacy practices, such as dark patterns, non-compliant implementations etc.
Agnostik’s team will join Didomi, significantly accelerating an ambitious product roadmap
Agnostik’s 13-people team, based in the prestigious startup incubator Station F, will join Didomi’s offices in the center of Paris, or spread across the globe, due to the company’s remote- friendly culture. While both brands will remain distinct, the combination of both entities will considerably accelerate the delivery of an ambitious privacy monitoring roadmap, at a critical time for brands and publishers seeking to build trust with privacy.
I am extremely proud to announce the acquisition of Agnostik, which is widely recognized for their technological and privacy expertise, especially among European publishers and brand marketers. We can’t wait to present our joint value proposition to our prospects and clients, as many of them face data privacy challenges that go beyond cookie consent management. Our synergies are exceptional, and we share a common vision of making a complex digital ecosystem more transparent and user-centric, fostering valuable trust through privacy.
— Romain Gauthier, CEO of Didomi
We are excited and delighted to write a new chapter in the life of our company. Joining Didomi is the best choice to strengthen Agnostik’s leadership in data privacy services, as we share the same ambition and dedication
to innovation. This acquisition will significantly increase the value of our respective solutions for our customers, today and tomorrow. More native integrations and more automation will help our clients get the most out of their data protection investments. Publishers, advertisers, and marketing technology companies now have a one-stop-shop to maximize the ROI of their digital operations, in full regulatory compliance.
— Frank Ducret, CEO of Agnostik
About Agnostik
Since 2017, Agnostik has offered expertise and solutions for CDOs, CROs and DPOs. With 13 talents, Agnostik was accelerated in 2020 to Station F by TF1 within the Medialab. Financed with its own funds and the support of Bpifrance, Agnostik’s mission is to support its partners in controlling and optimizing its value chain based on the use of user consent. For that purpose, Agnostik is providing both actionable privacy compliance insights and automation tools to its clients. Find out more at www.agnostik.fr/en.
About Didomi
Didomi builds technology that allows organizations to place customer consent at the core of their strategy. By making consent and preferences easily accessible, companies benefit from compliant customer data while seeing higher engagement and increased user trust. Consumers, on their side, are free to choose what data to share and how to stay connected to their favorite brands across touchpoints. Our products include a globally adopted Consent Management Platform (CMP), which collects billions of consents every month, a highly popular Preference Management Platform (PMP), and a powerful suite of bespoke solutions to build better consent and preference management. Find out more at www.didomi.io.
