A SoftBank company turning the richest first-party dataset on Earth - the mobile network - into privacy-safe measurement and marketing insight.
THE WORDMARK. Cinarra's identity on SoftBank navy - a decade-old bet that the carrier network, not the cookie, would become advertising's measurement layer.
In 2012, when most of digital advertising still ran on browser cookies, a small team led by Bell Labs Fellow Alex Zinin and entrepreneur Alexander Nikolaev started with an unfashionable premise: the mobile carrier already knows more about real-world behavior than any tracking cookie ever could. It just needed to be made private. That idea became Cinarra Systems.
Cinarra builds software that turns carrier-grade mobile network data into marketing insight - who visits which venues, whether a mobile ad drove a real store visit, and how to reach an audience without a cookie in sight. The catch, and the whole point, is that it does this without letting personal data leave the operator's own data center.
The company processes more than 3.5 billion 4G/LTE and Wi-Fi location signals a day, reaching over 30 million monthly active users across 500,000-plus venues, and cannot name a single one of them. Anonymization happens before analysis, by design.
That thesis attracted serious money early - a $4.5M Series A in 2013 led by Almaz Capital with Cisco, followed by a $20M Series B from SoftBank in 2015. Then, in June 2020, SoftBank did something telling: it bought the whole company. Cinarra is now a wholly owned SoftBank company, live inside SoftBank Corp.'s network in Japan and operating across the U.S. and Japan.
What looked like patience turned out to be timing. As third-party cookies crumble and retail media booms, the infrastructure Cinarra spent a decade building - store-visit attribution, venue analytics, carrier-based identity - is suddenly the center of the conversation.
"Cinarra is not a data broker or data exporter - it only utilizes anonymized data processed within a carrier's own data center."- Cinarra's stated privacy principle
An online-to-offline (O2O) attribution platform linking consumer mobile ad exposure to real venue visits, with privacy-safe analytics for campaign decisions.
Real-time analytics measuring the correlation between mobile website views and actual venue visits, giving advertisers a live read on impact.
Privacy-safe audience and persona segments built from real-world venue-visit behavior for targeting and activation.
Location and venue analytics measuring foot traffic, dwell and movement across hundreds of thousands of venues.
A carrier-based, cookieless marketing ID that securely links telco data with advertiser and media ecosystems for retargeting and measurement.
A privacy-first monetization platform that runs inside the operator's own data center, turning anonymized signals into a revenue stream.
Most location and measurement players collect data from apps and SDKs, then move it off-device. Cinarra flips the model: the operator already has the relationship, and the data is anonymized before it ever leaves the network. This is an illustrative view of what sets the approach apart.
Illustrative comparison based on Cinarra's stated model - relative, not audited benchmarks.
Cinarra is a B2B enterprise data platform. It deploys its technology inside a mobile operator's data center and monetizes anonymized network data three ways: attribution and measurement products sold to brands and agencies, audience segmentation and location analytics, and a revenue-share model that turns the carrier's own data into an advertising channel. The operator keeps control; Cinarra provides the engine.
The hard problem in Cinarra's world isn't creative - it's carrier-grade data engineering at billions of events per day, done privately. The team pairs telecom infrastructure know-how (its co-founder is a Bell Labs Fellow) with adtech and data science, spanning the U.S. and Japan. Its signature capability is anonymizing at the source: making sensitive network data useful without ever exposing an individual.
Alex Zinin and Alexander Nikolaev launch the company to build real-time mobile data analytics with network operators.
Round led by Almaz Capital with participation from Cisco to develop the carrier-data platform.
SoftBank leads a $20M round, deepening the carrier partnership and bringing total funding to $24.5M.
Online-to-offline attribution platform debuts as Cinarra goes live with SoftBank in Japan.
New attribution platform correlates mobile website views with real venue visits in real time.
SoftBank acquires Cinarra outright, making it a wholly owned SoftBank company.
Monetizing Mobile Insights.
Cinarra turns carrier-grade mobile network data into privacy-safe marketing insight - powering audience segmentation, store-visit attribution and cookieless targeting for mobile operators and advertisers.
Yes. SoftBank invested in Cinarra's 2015 Series B and acquired the company outright in June 2020, making it a wholly owned SoftBank company.
Cinarra processes and anonymizes data inside the carrier's own data center with no personally identifiable information exported. It is not a data broker or data exporter.
Cinarra was founded in 2012 by Alex Zinin, a Bell Labs Fellow, and Alexander Nikolaev, with early leadership focused on real-time mobile data analytics.
Its platforms include RealSight and VitalSight (attribution), RealPeople (audiences), VenueVitalics (venue analytics) and Cinarra MID, a carrier-based cookieless marketing ID.
Video: search "Cinarra RealSight" on YouTube for product overviews and carrier-data demos.