Amazon does it. Facebook does it. Just about every website you visit tries to figure out who you are in order to boost sales and engagement. But what if there was a way to guard user privacy while still delivering for businesses?
That’s exactly what Crossing Minds is setting out to do.
The San Francisco-based startup was founded in 2017 by CEO Alexandre Robicquet, CTO Emile Contal and Sebastian Thrun, who co-founded Google X's self-driving car project that became Waymo and is currently CEO of electric aircraft startup Kitty Hawk.
Crossing Minds delivers personalized recommendations without third-party cookies (technology used to track web visitors and collect their data) or extensive databases of personal user info. Instead, the company uses contextual clues gleaned from how a user interacts with a website. For example, search queries or what products a person clicks on.
The company says all it needs is a user's first three clicks on a website to deliver even better sales recommendations than the targeted approach that has become industry standard.
“I don’t need to have any single bit of information about where they are, who they are, the gender, the age. That’s completely pointless,” Robicquet said. “You have so much more information if you see what they’re actually looking at versus who they are.”
Robicquet, who studied mathematics, machine learning and artificial intelligence, co-founded Crossing Minds while working towards his doctorate at Stanford. He and Contal, a former professor, were nerding out about Pandora’s music recommendation algorithm and wondered if they could produce something even better.
It turned out, they could. Their recommendation algorithm was 20 points more accurate than other systems, Robicquet said.
In order to deliver these results, Crossing Minds takes a company's product catalogue and builds out an API in as little as two weeks to start delivering recommendations. Absolutely no user data is compiled from outside sources with contextual clues providing all the necessary data. This allows Crossing Minds to make accurate product recommendations whether a user is a returning customer or a new one.
The company's efforts have been aided by recently closed a $10 million Series A round led by Radical Ventures, Partech, Lerer Hippeau and Index Ventures, bringing its total funding to $14.8 million.
The company is headquartered in San Francisco with additional offices in Toronto and Paris. It currently has a full-time team of 10 employees, and Robicquet wants to at least triple that number by the end of 2022.
The North American and European markets are the company’s primary focus for the moment but Robicquet said they’ve been getting interest from potential partners in Asia, as well. Crossing Minds has around half a dozen customers, including French food company Danone, New York-based publisher Penguin Random House and Canadian temporary tattoo retailer Inkbox. The company builds out a custom product for free and then charges its customers on a subscription basis for using it.
Crossing Minds is taking off as concerns over individual data privacy have led to regulatory and policy shifts. In 2018, the European Union implemented its General Data Protection Regulation law, commonly referred to as GDPR. Among other rules, it requires companies to get informed consent from users before collecting any personal data.
That same year, Facebook came under fire for its history of lax privacy protections that led to the Cambridge Analytica scandal where user information was surreptitiously collected on the platform for the purpose of political advertising. Since then, Google has also announced that it would phase out its own use of third-party cookies in Chrome by the end of 2023 and earlier this year Apple implemented a new feature for iOS users that requires them to opt into data collection by third-party apps.
With this increasing awareness around privacy, Robicquet believes the future of personalized recommendations is steadily moving away from creating detailed dossiers on users. Eliminating third-party cookies and other tracking methods creates a more anonymized browsing experience that will make more and more users look like new customers — even if they're not.
A lot of businesses “have been brainwashed to think, ‘I need to know where they live’ versus needing to know what they want. I think this is a shift that is long overdue and is very painful for a lot of businesses,” Robicquet said, in particular pointing to companies that have invested in user tracking services over the past five or so years.
