Zeta Global’s IPO filing uncovers modest growth, strong adjusted profitability

Published May 24, 2021

Welcome back to the working week. Are you ready to get our hands a little dirty this morning?

Good. We have an IPO to catch up on, one I should have kept up with in the past few weeks. Regardless, today we’re looking at Zeta Global’s latest IPO filing ahead of its eventual pricing.

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Zeta Global is not a firm that I am very familiar with, but because Crunchbase notes that the New York-based startup has raised north of $600 million in private capital in the form of both equity financing and debt, it’s a unicorn worth understanding.

The gist is that Zeta ingests and crunches lots of data, helping its users market to their customers on a targeted basis throughout their individual buying lifecycles. In simpler terms, Zeta helps companies pitch customers in varied manners depending on their own characteristics.

You can imagine that, as the digital economy has grown, the sort of work Zeta Global supports has only expanded. So, has Zeta itself grown quickly? And does it have an attractive business profile? We want to know. We’ll also poke around its final private valuation so that we can see how much that number matches up — or doesn’t — to its recent financial results.

Sound good? Let’s find out why Staley Capital, GCP Capital Partners, Franklin Square Group, GPI Capital and others backed the firm.

Zeta Global’s business in brief

It can be useful to dissect a company’s marketing materials not just to see how well they describe themselves, but also to grok how they want to be perceived in the marketplace. Zeta is one such case.

Via its S-1 filings, here’s how it wants you to understand its business:

Zeta is a leading omnichannel data-driven cloud platform that provides enterprises with consumer intelligence and marketing automation software. We empower our customers to target, connect and engage consumers through software that delivers personalized marketing across all addressable channels, including email, social media, web, chat, connected TV (“CTV”) and video, among others.

If that didn’t make a lot of sense, it’s OK.