Adelaide Buys Rita to Enhance AU Attention Metric

Adelaide, the New York-based firm focusing on attention-based media quality measurement, has acquired European insights app and personal data marketplace Rita, whose deterministic behavioural data, ad exposure and outcomes data will be used to enhance its new parent's measurement models.

Rita gathers rich data from a community of 200,000 members, rewarding users for sharing insights into their online behavior across platforms including Google, Amazon and Facebook. Its app embraces European data rules, empowering individuals to invoke their Right to Access (RTA), by which they can view, control, and monetize the data collected by Big Tech companies. Rita then offers corporate clients analytics products based on this privacy-compliant data.

The all-stock transaction brings Rita's CEO John Arts and his core team of developers and data scientists to Adelaide, but the firms stress that Rita 'will retain its market independence': its privacy-friendly data will be used 'solely to improve media quality measurement', and not for targeting, personalization or attribution. Outcome data plays a key role in the calculation of Adelaide's AU metric, hence the firm says Rita's rich behavioral data will enhance its predictive accuracy. Adelaide is also investing to accelerate the global expansion of Rita's panel.

'John and I share a vision of empowering individuals to reclaim control of their data' says Adelaide CEO and founder Marc Guldimann, 'and actively participate in the data marketplace. Adelaide will utilize Rita's data in a completely privacy-friendly manner to continue refining the accuracy and utility of AU'. Arts agrees: 'Marc and I are very aligned on the problems and needed changes in today's data economy. We aim to bring transparency to the industry and put power in the hands of the individual'.

Adelaide also announced today it had raised a further $1.4m in a seed-extension round, led by AperiamVentures, joined by new investments from GOAL Ventures and Nishat Mehta, and previous investors BlueTree and Human Ventures. The funds till be used to enhance product capabilities and grow the team worldwide.

Web sites: www.adelaidemetrics.com .