Dataships is an Irish data privacy software and services company specialising in automating GDPR and CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) compliance for eCommerce clients. The startup just closed a $7 million Series A funding round led by Osage Ventures Partners (backed Rep AI and HackTheBox) with participation from Lavrock Ventures and the Urban Innovation Fund.
The funding will accelerate the company’s mission to help merchants dramatically grow their marketing lists, and drive revenue growth, while maintaining complete data privacy compliance.
It will support the company in developing new features that unlock even higher audience growth while maintaining compliance, expanding to more segments of the e-commerce ecosystem, and scaling the engineering and support teams to serve its rapidly growing merchant base.
What role does it play?
The e-commerce landscape has undergone a major shift. Rising customer acquisition costs, privacy regulations, and sky-high expectations on personalisation and communication have merchants searching for sustainable ways to grow.
Dataships was founded as a compliance tech company, but the team quickly realised that smarter compliance management is a massively untapped lever for growth.
What does Dataships do?
Dataships was founded in 2019 by Michael Storan and Ryan McErlane. It is co-located at NexusUCD in Dublin and in San Francisco, California, and currently employs 25 people.
The one-size-fits-all approach of most consent collection setups at checkout can cause problems. The Dataships platform solves this by being the only solution that guarantees both list growth and compliance at checkout. This is especially beneficial for multi-channel, multinational brands that need to be able to serve different consent configurations for both email and SMS and for shoppers in different regions.
The company’s recent innovations include SMS Easy Opt-in, which replaces “Reply Y” with in-checkout verification, delivering 10x more marketable SMS contacts and A/B Testing Engine, which is a transparent measurement of baseline vs. optimised opt-in rates, directly tied to repeat purchase impact.
Ryan McErlane, co-founder and co-CEO, Dataships said, “Most eCommerce brands follow a familiar playbook, drive traffic, offer discounts for email sign-ups, maybe test a traffic de-anonymizer, hope for purchases and remarket those that don’t. But this underutilises the most impactful and brief moment for building marketing lists, the checkout. Since focusing on the eCommerce market, we’ve discovered something extraordinary, when done right, compliance isn’t just about protection, it’s about growth. By dynamically optimising consent language at the checkout, based on visitor location and marketing channel, we’re helping merchants achieve remarkable results in terms of increased opt-in rates, marketing contacts, and additional revenue generated through repeat purchases.”
Michael Storan, co-founder and co-CEO, Dataships said, “In today’s landscape where acquisition costs are still rising, personalization is expected, and privacy is a real concern from shoppers, merchants need more than just tactics, they need a systematic approach to expand reach and more meaningfully engage their highest-value audience, purchasers. We’re building Dataships to be the essential growth platform for modern eCommerce brands. One that transforms compliance from a burden into a competitive advantage, helping merchants build larger, more engaged marketing lists that drive sustainable revenue growth.”
