AAA LiveRamp acquires DataFleets

LiveRamp acquires DataFleets

LiveRamp, a New York-listed data connectivity service, has agreed to acquire DataFleets, a cloud data platform backed by south Korea-based conglomerate LG’s corporate venturing unit. LiveRamp is paying an undisclosed amount to DataFleets’ data protection capabilities.

David Gilmore, CEO of DataFleets, said: “The synergies are strong, and together we can help global enterprises remove barriers to data access and usage to power insights and innovation across their businesses.”

In October, DataFleets raised $4.5m in its seed round. Venture capital firms AME Cloud Ventures and Morado Ventures co-led the consortium, which included VCs Lightspeed Venture Partners, Peterson Ventures and Mark Cuban Companies, as well as LG, Stanford University’s StartX fund and angel investors Marty Chavez and the founders from unicorns Rappi, Quora and Lucid Software.

At the time of the seed round, Taejoon Park, managing director of LG Technology Ventures (LGV), said: “As a large corporation, LG has customer data scattered across affiliates that cannot be easily centralised due to data privacy and data ownership. This handicaps our ability to fully utilise data’s value and to better serve our customers. We are incredibly excited about how the DataFleets federated learning platform can unlock the full potential of decentralised data in a privacy-preserving manner.”

He added by email on the exit: “It is an exit in seven months and LGV’s very first exit, so we are very excited about having a very good first exit.”

By James Mawson

James Mawson is founder and chief executive of Global Venturing.