The story

Driftrock operates in the digital marketing technology industry.

While marketing platforms like Facebook have amazing targeting capabilities, what they lack is all the data companies have on their customers such as what they've bought, and where they are in their customer lifecycle. Without this data, advertisements become generic and bare little fruit due to ineffective targeting. This is a problem exacerbated when customers make purchases offline. Driftrock's Customer Data Platform connects such customer data with marketing, enabling the implementation of GDPR-compliant targeting strategies.

Driftrock's Solution Driftrock's mission is to make advertising something people want to see. It does this through its proprietary people-based marketing platform which combines the rich, authentic data held by social channels with customer data held by brands to communicate relevant messages to their target audiences at the right time.

The technology has proven highly effective as brands increasingly demand marketing technology that closes the loop online to offline, and allows seamless communication over the customer journey, on all the channels they hang out. This capacity is amplified for Driftrock where the platform can be seamlessly executed across multiple products, channels and geographies.

The team

CEO Matthew Wheeler brings a wealth of experience in founding, growing and investing in startups. He was the third employee at Forward Internet Group (which grew to £100m+ revenues), founded Omio.com which merged with uSwitch and was a founding partner at Forward Partners. Alongside Matt is Corinne Thompson as CFO/COO and Max Dupenois as CTO. Corinne is a qualified accountant who spent five years ay KPMG before heading u finance at GoCardless. Max has a Doctorate in Computer Science, researched Data Science, and later went on to become an engineer. He has held a number of Senior Developer positions at DropWines, Forward Internet Group, AND Forward Labs. Jonathan McKay is Driftrock’s Chairman with over 30 years of international experience in the industry.

The lead investor

Lead Investor, Ascension, has a rigorous investment evaluation process and is highly selective in putting forward opportunities for investment from its funds. Since 2013, Ascension has invested in over 65 UK based early-stage companies predominantly in digital media and tech. Ascension’s CEO, Jean de Fougerolles, is a successful Entrepreneur and Angel Investor - he exited his business, Two-Way Media to Virgin and Ingenious; following which he set up Ascension Ventures with Kieran Hill.

The management team and existing investors are very strong at Driftrock, which is one of the key reasons why Ascension invested. Matt Wheeler, CEO, has significant experience in marketing, with a career background that has involved scaling and selling companies