Addressable raises $7.5M to match crypto wallets to Twitter accounts. But how?

Marketo, which was developed — among other things — to enhance marketing around social media users, ended up being acquired by Adobe. Now a new startup hopes to do what Marketo did in Web 2.0, but this time in web3.

Addressable has a digital fingerprinting startup that claims to be able to match anonymous crypto wallets with social media accounts. Indeed, it’s so confident it can do this, that it claims to have matched 17 million crypto wallet holders with their Twitter accounts.

That’s quite a tall order, but let’s return to that.

For now, we can at least say it has some investor confidence. It’s now raised a $7.5 million seed round from Viola Ventures, Fabric Ventures, Mensch Capital Partners and North Island Ventures.

The problem Addressable says it is solving is that because crypto wallets are anonymous, web3 marketers can’t know their audience’s age, country or purchasing history. I mean, that was kind’ve the point right?

Addressable claims it solves this by associating anonymous blockchain audiences with their social media accounts, by looking at data points across blockchain activity that can be correlated with social media activity. This then allows marketers to promote games or conferences etc. to crypto wallet holders on Twitter, thus increasing the return on ad spend by targeting audiences that are more likely to buy products, and introducing higher efficacy/ROI.

To do this they needed to look at 500 million+ crypto wallets and 100 million+ social accounts, then create the algorithms to match these data points.

Tomer Sharoni (co-founder and CEO) was previously VP of Product at Salt Security. Tomer Shlomo (co-founder and CTO) has been at Synamedia, among others. Dr. Asaf Nadler (co-founder and chief scientist) has been at Akamai Technologies, among others.

Speaking to TechCrunch via email Sharoni said: “Addressable.io competes with other Web3 CRM startups including such as Blaze, Cookie3, Kazm and Absolute Labs, that focus mainly on customer reactivation by analyzing and engaging with the company’s existing on-chain user base.”

He claims Addressable is different because it takes a “more holistic and comprehensive approach by unlocking all Web3 on-chain users.”

It’s of course very hard to verify if they can do any of this, but clearly their investors seem convinced, at the very least.