“It’s a really large market, it’s very global,” he adds on why the company has gone back for a second dip into VC now. It then does its own weighting and probabilistic matching to extrapolate out from the millions of (pseudonymized) survey responses it receives — to what it describes as “global insights at scale, representing the views of 2.7BN, digitally-connected consumers”; covering data about consumers’ demographics, preferences, and behavioural attitudes — all with the goal of helping customers (major brands, agencies, and media organisations) gain a deeper understanding of their audiences.“We’re looking at preference, attitudes, lifestyles, brand choices, types of media consumed, demographics — the broad subsets,” says Smith, sketching the broad-brush insights the platform serves up to help customers profile their audiences. Which is a very unique proposition.”“Every company needs to understand their target audiences, whether they’re future customers, current customers, or the market place they operate in. And you going to end up with a very substandard set of data, ultimately.“The problem we’re solving is by collecting this massive pool of global data any company, regardless of size, scale or budget, can utilize our data to build a really rich understanding of their target audiences that would be impossible with market research.”Smith says GWI’s latest chunk of VC funding will go on further expansion of GWI’s geographical reach and demographic depth. Creating insights should be as easy as searching Google; and sharing them and aligning across an organisation should be effortless and embedded whether the company is five people or five million. With GWI trotting along a path that could lead to a unicorn valuation this once bootstrapped startup has come a long way — in time and money — from earlier years, such as when Smith had to take some 200 meetings to nail down its first customer (Microsoft). Following its $40M Series A, GWI says it’s tripled recurring revenue and grown to nearly 400 employees based across offices in London, New York, Prague, and Athens. Smith also confirms that the unique IDs GWI receives from panel providers (which would likely still constitute personal data under EU law) are never passed to customers.“The general movement from GDPR and towards individual privacy has been really good for us because people increasingly having to work with aggregated and anonymized data — which is what is our absolute strength and really core for our proposition,” he adds. Smith adds that GWI is in the process of rolling out a new feature that will enable customers to push an audience that’s been identified in its platform into Facebook — based on “matching the common variables” — much like Facebook’s own ‘lookalike audience’ ad targeting tool.