• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, February 24, 2020

Neutronian, a Silicon Valley company backed by data experts and leading angel investors, will announce Tuesday the launch of a compliance and source measurement verification platform that scores data quality for marketers and advertisers.

The verification platform acts similar to a FICO credit score for people-based data.

Neutronian wants to protect consumers, publishers and marketers from low-quality data providers and those using data without permission.

“The name of the company is super geeky,” said Timur Yarnall, cofounder and CEO at Neutronian. “It’s supposed to mean neutral and independent measurement.”

Omnicom Media Group and Goodway Group are among those on the advisory board testing the platform.

About 10 industry insiders participated in the advisory board. Amanda Martin, VP of enterprise partnerships at Goodway Group, represented media buyers. “The data space is difficult to navigate,” she said. “It’s filled with black-box methods and you’re not always sure what you’re buying.”

Martin said the executives at Neutronian had a good understanding of the industry’s needs, and they just wanted to “gut check” their intuition against the thoughts of others. She also said that long term, data scores could have an influence on data pricing. The higher the quality, the more the data will cost. It’s difficult today to determine the quality, so it’s equally difficult to determine the cost.

“We saw with the closing of Jumpshot for not having the consent and proper permissions to use the data, which impacted Hitwise having to close because they relied on that data,” she said. “The IAB data label wouldn’t have caught that, but an audit by Neutronian would.”

Eyeota and TVision are among the companies that are also participating in the initial launch.

TVision went through the auditing process. “It’s a way to communicate to the market that we have sound approaches to privacy,” said Luke McGuinness, president of TVision. “To gain certification, they use a lot of detailed questions about how we do what we do, such as details about our security practices, how we collect and process the data, and how we build our products.”

Data providers wishing to become certified must go through an audit process as well as provide feeds for ongoing monitoring via a SaaS platform.

Fifteen data suppliers have either completed the initial audit and certification or are in process of completing it during the second quarter of 2020. Among them are TVision, a connected TV panel data provider; Eyeota, an audience technology platform; Pathmatics, an audience intelligence panel provider; and ShareThis, audience builders that map consumer insights, interest and intent from digital behavioral data.

Neutronian's first round of financing included backing from leading angel investors in both Silicon Valley and New York including Anneka Gupta of LiveRamp, Hans Tung of GGV, Eric Franchi of Math Capital, Amar Goel of Pubmatic, Auren Hoffman of SafeGraph, Colin Digiaro formerly of SGN Games, and Jay Eum, formerly of Translink Capital.