digitalAudience + Rayn.io: When Deterministic & Probablistic Become One
Greetings readers. FPC hopes you have recovered from your CES travels. Apparently, agentic ad tech is hot, and these automated agents will increase the advertising TAM from $1 trillion to $2 trillion (time period unknown). The less said about that, the better - but keep on building and shipping people.
In this week’s edition, we are going to focus on a small but significant piece of M&A that will have a big impact on one of our portfolio companies going forward. FPC is, of course, referring to the Rayn and digitalAudience deal that was announced this week.
There has been a lot of debate (arguments) about the use of ID-based targeting. Publicis and WPP have had an interesting back-and-forth on probabilistic versus deterministic approaches.
The simple truth is: you cannot operate in this business without an ID graph - especially in a highly fragmented market like Europe. Publicis bought Lotame to fill that capability gap. Liveramp has some coverage, but not meaningful. Big in the US, granted, but struggles elsewhere.
Data Meshing FTW
We invested in digitalAudience because we knew there was an issue across Europe. DA has been quietly building its ID graph in Northern Europe and Scandinavia.
It’s now in the UK, Germany, Spain and Italy. And will soon announce a huge data deal that will cement it as Europe’s go-to ID graph.
Built as a privacy- and European-first solution, DA’s platform has been thoroughly road-tested for a future that will ultimately be dominated by data sovereignty (more on that later) and tighter data legislation.
Europe is a market you can not operate in without a company like digitalAudience.
Rayn Brings New Scale Capabilities
That’s what makes its recently announced acquisition of Rayn all the more interesting.
Rayn was founded and built by industry stalwarts, Tim Geenen and Niels Baarsma. Both have had stellar careers in ad tech and sold their last company to Liveramp.
Rayn adds serious firepower (technology and talent) to digitalAudience’s already impressive platform, enabling it to model synthetic audience personas using DA’s extensive ID graph.
Why is this important? Well, you kind of need some probabilistic magic in environments where there is a dearth of cookies and IDs for scaled data-driven buys.
Unlike traditional probabilistic methodologies, though, Rayn does not stitch together a bunch of personally identifiable information to reconstruct users across different channels.
When integrated with digitalAudience’s ID graph, Rayn probabilistically infers user matches and audience behaviour.
Rayn isn’t trying to guess the user; it’s trying to guess the user behaviour. Below is a crude visual of how digitalAudience and Rayn.io will work together.
Data Sovereignty Is Top Of Mind
In the last two weeks, FPC has fielded questions from strategic investors about data sovereignty amid heightened tensions between the US and Europe - economic and geopolitical. What can you say? Who knew we all cared about the independence of Greenland?
Now you might be thinking this is a little extreme. It’s not. These are now boardroom discussions among European-based brands, and it’s a very real concern.
Geopolitical risks will also lead to fresh litigation in 2026 around the transfer of European citizens’ data to the US. This isn’t idle speculation. Max Schrems, the crown prince of data privacy activism, is preparing himself for another battle over the practice. The man has a track record of winning these cases.
Because Rayn is not an ID-based solution, there is no need to employ US ID graphs or cloud infrastructure for matching. Rayn is all about signal - not ID.
This enables European brands to keep data regional, making it less exposed to any ugly data sovereignty issues.
This is a solid piece of M&A, making digitalAudience even more strategic to its customers (publishers, brands, and agencies) and, of course, to potential acquirers. With several major client wins to be announced, digitalAudience is primed for a strong 2026.
And that’s it for this week, readers. Have a great ad tech day and weekend.