Check out the pitch deck that helped adtech metadata startup Sincera raise $4.2 million in seed funding

• Adtech startup Sincera, which offers metadata to other adtech firms, raised $4.2 million in funding.
• The company plans to grow its team and access more compute through its cloud providers.
• Check out the pitch deck that helped it raise funds from investors including NextView Ventures.

Sincera, a startup that uses metadata to help adtech companies improve their offerings, has recently raised $4.2 million in seed funding.

The 2022-founded New York-based company provides a telemetry service that crawls websites to determine everything that informs the ad transactions that occur there.

Sincera imitates a real user, much like a secret shopper visiting a retail store, and can assist adtech companies in analyzing, for example, the types of technology a publisher is using to identify its readers or whether the site is compliant with local privacy laws.

Sincera Mike O’Sullivan met fellow cofounder Ian Meyers while leading product at the supply-side platform Index Exchange, which was collaborating with data platform LiveRamp, where Meyer was leading its identity solution. The pair kept in touch and worked on thorny, laborious, and often unglamorous adtech problems “at nights and weekends for fun,” according to O’Sullivan. They eventually realized there was money to be made from this work.

“We’re like Mike Rowe of ‘Dirty Jobs,’ the guy who goes on the Discovery Channel who looks at what it’s like to be a sewer inspector — that’s what we are of adtech,” O’Sullivan said in an interview with Insider.

Sincera was inspired by a folk tale told by O’Sullivan’s father when he was younger about the etymology of the word “sincere.” Following the plundering of Greek cities, Roman bazaars would frequently sell statues. However, because the statues had been patched up with wax, they would begin to melt weeks after people had taken them home. To demonstrate the quality of their sculptures, some stall holders would display signs saying “sine” — meaning “without” in Latin — “cera,” the word for wax.

“There was a truthfulness we thought was lacking in the dialog of much of the industry and also how products were being used and made,” O’Sullivan said in a statement.

Sincera intends to only work with adtech companies and will charge a monthly fee for data access as well as some additional processing fees. Customers have included LiveRamp, ID5, and The Trade Desk, a publicly traded adtech company.

NextView Ventures led Sincera’s seed round. AperiamVentures, LiveRamp Ventures, and The Trade Desk’s TD7 venture fund were among those who took part.

Sincera intends to use the new funds to grow its current team of nine to around 14, with plans to hire heads of sales, go-to-market strategy, customer analysis, and engineering. The remainder will be invested in compute as it expands its customer base and begins to crawl more data in areas such as in-app advertising and connected-TV.

Check out the key slides from Sincera’s pitch deck, which helped the company raise $4.2 million in seed funding.