Osage Venture Partners is pleased to announce our lead investment in Dataships’ $7M Series A round. Dataships offers a groundbreaking platform that helps eCommerce businesses grow their marketable contacts, and thus revenue, while ensuring data privacy compliance. Based in Dublin, Ireland and San Francisco, the company offers the first email and SMS compliance engine to integrate at the checkout stage of ecommerce stores, enabling retailers to gather consumer data responsibly and efficiently. Dataships’ technology empowers customers to generate robust marketing lists that are usable and relevant, increasing customer lifetime value and turning privacy compliance into a revenue engine.
In the years following the pandemic, the eCommerce market has flourished and is expected to expand from $10.2 trillion in 2025 to $21.2 trillion by 2030, a projected 15.8% CAGR, driven by the ongoing shift to online shopping and new developments in the eCommerce sector. Alongside this acceleration of online shopping, customer acquisition costs (CAC) have surged, with eCommerce brands now spending over three times as much to acquire each customer compared to a decade ago. Many cite data privacy regulations and the phasing out of third-party cookies as leading factors, in conjunction with the dominance of Google, Meta, and Amazon in customer acquisition. To counteract this, 67% of companies are focusing on improving retention as a strategy to help them increase the overall lifetime value of their customers and rely on maintaining compliant marketing lists to effectively reengage with existing customers.
Email and SMS remain two of the most vital communication channels for eCommerce retailers. In 2023, brands sent 23 billion promotional emails via Omnisend—a 33% year-over-year increase. Similarly, SMS campaigns grew by over 55%. These engagement strategies not only build contact lists that are essential for eCommerce stores in generating new customers, but also help brands to retain their existing patrons as well. Yet escalating regulations for opt-in data privacy have created meaningful challenges in optimizing these channels. Current data privacy solutions to create compliant marketing lists are primarily focused on providing consent management tools for 3rd party cookies or focusing on the post-collection effort of cleaning and verifying contact information for compliance, while data mapping and customer data platform (CDP) tools offer minimal support in data privacy and compliance. Across all these solutions, there is a noticeable lack of emphasis on ensuring that the extracted data reaches its fullest potential for revenue acceleration while also maintaining compliance.
Dataships stands out as the first compliance technology to operate at the checkout stage of eCommerce websites, utilizing its proprietary email and SMS consent rules engine to collect actionable 1st party data with ease while adhering to data privacy laws. The company’s consent management tool automatically detects the shopper’s location and adjusts the opt-in/out consent prompts according to local data privacy regulations, enabling Dataships users to effortlessly collect consumer data and compliantly boost their Marketing Consent Rate (MCR), the percentage of customers who actively choose (opt-in) to receive marketing communications from a brand. Leading Irish fashion and home retailer Carraig Donn was able to increase their MCR from 9% to 80%, unlocking 17,000 new marketable contacts and a 52x ROI over 8 months of using the product. Another Dataships client, online female fashion retailer iClothing, saw their MCR increase to 90%, which allowed them to generate an additional €600,000 from their email and SMS marketing efforts. Dataships also serves as a system of record for consumer compliance data, shielding them from potential legal action. This makes the product incredibly sticky as customers can’t afford to lose this data.
Above all, we are proud to partner with an outstanding team of seasoned data compliance experts propelling innovation in the industry. Dataships is led by co-CEOs, Michael Storan and Ryan McErlane, childhood friends who have united to solve critical problems in the data compliance industry. Michael is a passionate entrepreneur who brings first-hand experience with data privacy challenges from a prior exited startup, and Ryan is a former consultant at Accenture and EY, where he specialized in leading large-scale technology and compliance programs.
We are delighted to join many respected investors and industry experts, including Lavrock Ventures and Urban Innovation Fund, to support Michael, Ryan, and the rest of the Dataships team in their growth. We look forward to a successful partnership with Dataships on the journey to transforming data compliance challenges into revenue growth opportunities, empowering eCommerce businesses around the world.