- LinkedIn has announced it has acquired digital identity company Drawbridge
- Drawbridge is going to be integrated into LinkedIn Marketing Solutions
LinkedIn — the professional social network owned that Microsoft acquired for $26.2 billion in June 2016 — has announced that it has acquired Drawbridge, which is a digital identity management company that will be integrated into the social network’s marketing services. This will help LinkedIn Marketing Solutions expand even more aggressively as the unit saw 46% year-over-year in revenue.
Drawbridge essentially helps companies understand customers using machine learning as it connects and unifies customer data to create a complete view of the people you do business with. Drawbridge’s graph combines billions of customer touchpoint with a depth of online and offline interactions. Some of Drawbridge’s customers include Adobe, IBM, The Trade Desk, Samsung, Publicis, and Foursquare. And LinkedIn is going to use Drawbridge’s technology to help customers target professional audiences.
Drawbridge was founded by Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan — who was previously a member of technical staff at Google and a senior research scientist at AdMob (2007-2010). Prior to joining AdMob, Sivaramakrishnan was a research scientist at Stanford (2001-2007). Matt Murphy of Menlo Ventures told Crunchbase News that he was “very excited for Kamakshi and the Drawbridge team.” Murphy is also on Drawbridge’s board. Before the acquisition, Drawbridge raised nearly $69 million in VC funding.
Tomer Cohen, the VP of Products at LinkedIn, pointed out that LinkedIn recently launched a new Pages experience that enables businesses to foster conversations with the community of more than 630 million members. And the company also launched objective-based advertising in Campaign Manager to help customers customize campaign creation experiences based on their objectives.
“These offerings have helped brands and marketers better engage with their professional audiences, with 78% of B2B marketers rating LinkedIn as the most effective social media platform at helping their organization achieve specific objectives,” wrote Cohen in a blog post. “We believe Drawbridge’s team and technology will allow us to accelerate the capabilities of our Marketing Solutions platform, helping our customers better reach and understand their professional audiences and measure the ROI of their campaigns across mobile and desktop.”
