• by Laurie Sullivan , February 23, 2026

Experian announced the acquisition of AtData on Monday, adding intelligence to the company's existing identity, data, analytics, and decisioning capabilities.

Jeff Softley, CEO of Experian North America, believes AtData is another step in the company's strategy to build the "most comprehensive and privacy-centric identity infrastructure in the age of artificial intelligence (AI).

Email is a powerful and persistent digital identifier, per the company, which is why it's central to AtData's platform, but this acquisition also is about strengthening Experian's broader identity and fraud capabilities.

Email signals connect to other identity elements, including devices, behavioral data, and traditional identifiers which enable a more complete view of identity across channels. Over time, company executives expects to see opportunities to innovate across credit, fraud, marketing, and identity use cases by combining these complementary assets.

AtData holds real-time email insights on more than 10 billion email addresses worldwide and 98% of active emails in North America. It leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning models to process billions of monthly activity signals. The deal is expected to give Experian's clients the ability to make faster actionable, signal-driven decisions for campaigns.

Prior to this acquisition, AtData, formed in 2022 through the merger of TowerData and FreshAddress, operated as a private company backed by the private equity firm TZP Group.

AtData's real-time signals will integrate with Experian's consumer data and AI-driven platforms to improve identity authentication.

The acquisition follows a 15-year partnership between the two companies.

"This isn't just about adding capabilities, it's about creating an integrated, durable identity solution that helps our clients deliver better experiences at every stage of the customer journey," Softley stated in a release.

AtData's core capabilities are risk analysis to generate Risk Scores, predictive modeling, integration of first-party data and personalization and retargeting. 

Its model is trained on millions of real and fake examples of emails to spot random "gibberish" -- a special filter that stops fake or spam email addresses from entering a company's database.

Instead of just checking if an email is formatted correctly by using machine learning to analyze the actual string of characters, it looks for patterns that do not match natural human-type actions.

Tom Burke will continue to lead the business and will report into Experian’s leadership team. 

Burke founded TowerData in 2001, and carried out the merger to create AtData.

The combined data will enable Experian to carry out its long-term strategy for 2026 by transitioning from a traditional credit bureau to a global data and technology leader as the company expands further to change its role in verticals like automotive and health and digital commerce.