- Identity and email management company Lockr raised $2.5 million in pre-seed funding this week.
- It provides an email solution for consumers and customer identity tools for publishers and marketers.
- Check out the pitch deck that convinced investors like Mozilla Ventures to join the funding round.
Lockr, a digital identity management startup, said this week it had raised $2.5 million in pre-seed funding, investment it plans to use to grow its team, scale its userbase, and add more features to its consumer product.
Tired of inboxes bulging with spam, consumers are increasingly using services like Apple’s Hide My Email, Firefox Relay, or Proton Mail to create temporary email addresses when shopping online or signing into websites and apps.
But this means marketers and publishers have less visibility about who their customers are and can’t re-engage with those users. Publishers and marketers are becoming ever more reliant on first-party data, including real email addresses, due to the depreciation of tracking cookies and device IDs, like Apple’s IDFA.
“Publishers need first-party data to generate higher CPMs and match rates,” said Keith Petri, Lockr cofounder. CPMs are the rate advertisers pay to reach 1,000 users, and match rates are the ability to match a publisher’s audience with a marketer’s.
Founded in New York 2021, Lockr offers both a consumer-facing product and a business solution to mitigate the impact of burner emails.
On the consumer side, LockrMail offers a secure email address and Chrome extension that connects with users’ existing emails but pre-filters their inboxes for only the most relevant content. It means they don’t have to share their personal email addresses when signing up for a service, but can still receive useful information like emailed discount codes when they visit a retailer’s website. Users can also set up their own custom filters to block certain brands or types of content, but LockrMail will still store those emails if the user ends up needing them later on.
For publishers and marketers, the company provides Identity Lockr. If a user attempts to enter a machine-generated email to sign into a site, a message will appear asking them to instead use a personal, work or LockrMail. If the user gives consent, Lockr will provide the publisher with hashed versions of their personal and work emails, aiding subscriber marketing and revenue optimization. Lockr also offers a real-time analytics dashboard.
Lockr is currently pre-revenue as it looks to grow its userbase. It plans to eventually introduce monetization in the form of freemium subscriptions for consumers, and transaction charges and software as a service fees for businesses.
Investors in Lockr’s pre-seed funding round included Mozilla Ventures, Junction Venture Partners, and Grit Capital Partners, as well as individual investors.
Petri said Lockr intends to use the funds to grow its intentionally lean team from six currently to around 10, making hires in engineering, publisher development, and marketing. Lockr quickly wants to scale its publisher network and provide more features for the consumer product, such as expanding into text messaging and building a shipping portal for users to track all their current orders in one place.
“I want every single individual adult and contributing member of society to have a Lockr account and have it touch their everyday life,” Petri said.
Check out a redacted version of Lockr’s pre-seed financing pitch deck below
Read the full article here
