We’re excited to announce that Firstparty has raised $5.75 million in seed funding! The round is co-led by Chris Howard at Fuel Capital and Boris Wertz at Version One Ventures. Participants in the round include Flybridge Capital Partners, Volo Ventures, John Sheehan, Chad Etzel, Tyler Willis, Pete Kim, Scott Yacko, Lane Becker, Chuck Reynolds, Kim Kressaty, and Daniel and Kathryn Clark.
Firstparty is on a mission to make it easy for companies to collect and take action on their customer data. The company was founded in August 2021 by long-time colleagues and friends Jonathan Kressaty and Danielle Morrill, who share deep domain expertise in marketing and developer tools. Through our work with companies including Twilio, Parse, Mattermark, GitLab, Github, and Frame.io, we’ve seen first-hand the power of first-party customer analytics.
We’re using this funding to obtain product-market fit and grow our team, and we’re hiring!
What Is Firstparty
Firstparty provides businesses with a complete view of their customer’s journey, from initial awareness through conversion. We generate first-party cookies on behalf of the brand, allowing for highly segmented, granular, detailed data collection and personalization of the customer experience.
Instead of passing personally identifiable information (PII) to third parties, we enable businesses to store events in their own data warehouse. Firstparty also anonymizes this data so our customers can generate targeted audiences to run advertising campaigns without revealing sensitive consumer information.
We created Firstparty as a product because we saw companies trying to build this solution in-house. It’s challenging to keep up with the rapidly evolving data privacy landscape as it intersects with sales and marketing technology. Even companies who have the engineering resources to create customer solutions prefer to specialize and outsource this challenge to us.
Firstparty launched its initial event-based analytics product to developers and marketers in October 2021 and announced audience management and conversion attribution in March 2022. Since launch, we have processed millions of events for customers.
Why Now?
Google is Sunsetting Universal Analytics
Universal Analytics will stop processing new events on July 1, 2023, and Google is encouraging users to migrate to GA4. A notable shortcoming of GA4 is that it does not include some of the granular information Universal Analytics currently provides, such as what keywords people use to find a website and specific products a visitor adds to their shopping cart. The consequences of this change for marketing teams may include degraded reporting and data-driven automation that no longer performs.
Firstparty is the perfect solution for businesses that want to maintain, and increase, their current level of data and insight without relying on third-party platforms.
With this change more than a year away, most marketing teams are not yet thinking about how they will address these changes. We’re looking for a Content Marketer to help us educate the market.
Cookieless Marketing is Coming
Safari and Firefox no longer support cross-site cookie tracking in the browser, and Google Chrome, the dominant browser in use worldwide, will stop supporting it by the end of 2022.
These changes mean businesses will no longer be able to track people across the web using cookies and will need to find alternative ways to collect data. Firstparty enables customers to use their first-party cookies to collect usage events. Our data collection method will continue to work when third-party cookies are no longer supported.
The Power of First-party Data
We believe marketers building first-party data assets are setting the standard for marketing success. By taking control of customer profiles, brands leverage granular information that is more accurate, complete, and timely than any other source.
First-party data is collected directly from individuals’ interactions with a company and include any part of the customer journey that a brand controls. Traditionally, these would consist of interactions like website visits, app downloads, e-commerce purchases, and other significant funnel conversion steps.
First-party data is essential for understanding how your customers interact with your brand across all touch-points. Data-driven insights into which marketing messages resonate with audiences are powerful because companies can use them to create a single customer view to personalize the customer journey and improve conversions.
Finally, first-party data enables companies to stitch together interactions across many channels, including social media, product usage, sales conversations, live chat, and customer service interactions. We are excited to see what developers build with programmatic access to the entire end-to-end customer experience through our APIs.
About Firstparty
Firstparty provides businesses with detailed analysis and attribution of their customer’s journey, from initial awareness through conversion. We’re constantly adding new features and integrations, so be sure to check back often to see what’s new.
We’re growing our team – join us!