Irish data privacy software and services company Dataships has closed a $7m (€6.8m) Series A funding round.

The company was founded in 2019 by Michael Storan and Ryan McErlane and specialises in automating GDPR and CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) compliance for e-commerce clients.

Co-located at NexusUCD and in San Francisco, the company currently employs 25 people, and intends to accelerate its efforts to help merchants grow their marketing lists while maintaining data privacy compliance.

Dataships claims its clients have added 8m+ marketable contacts and generated $112m in additional revenue through 1.1m repeat purchases to date.

The company is employed by more than 500 high-growth brands, including trackable wallet maker Ekster, Tom Brady's TB12, and Benchmade Knives.

Osage Ventures Partners led the funding round with participation from Lavrock Ventures and the Urban Innovation Fund.

“Most e-commerce 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," said McErlane, co-founder and co-CEO of Datashops.

"Since focusing on the e-commerce 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.

“The one-size-fits-all approach of most consent collection setups at checkout can cause problems. It usually either has too high of a standard for compliance, which loses opt-ins, or too low a standard for compliance, which poses compliance risks," he added.

Dataships said the funding would support the company in the key areas of product innovation, market expansion and customer success.

The firm intends to develop new features for better audience growth, expand to further segments of the e-commerce ecosystem, and scale its engineering and support teams to serve is growing merchant base.

The company's recent innovations include SMS Easy Opt-in, which replaces 'reply Y' with in-checkout verification, and an A/B Testing Engine to measure baseline and optimised opt-in rates, directly tied to repeat purchase impact.

“In today’s landscape where acquisition costs are still rising, personalisation 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," said Storan, co-founder and co-CEO of Dataships.

"We’re building Dataships to be the essential growth platform for modern e-commerce 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.”

Accounts for Blackrock-based Dataships Ltd show the company had net liabilities of €3.2m at the end of 2023 after making an annual loss of €1.35m.

Photo: Michael Storan and Ryan McErlane, co-founders and co-CEOs, Dataships. (Pic: Dataships)