Company Dossier
Data Infrastructure · Martech · AI
New York, USA
Data Collaboration · Est. 2016
Narrative I/O
The company teaching enterprise data to speak one language - and to do it without ever leaving home.
The company teaching enterprise data to speak one language - and to do it without ever leaving home.
Most companies have already spent the money. They bought the warehouse, hired the data scientists, and signed the vendor contracts. And yet, when a marketer asks a simple question - who are our best customers and where can we reach them - the answer still takes weeks, if it comes at all. The data is there. It just refuses to work together.
Narrative I/O, a New York company founded in 2016, was built around that specific frustration. Its founder, Nick Jordan, a veteran of Tapad, Adobe and Yahoo, called the problem "data deficiency": the gap between owning data and actually being able to use it. Narrative's answer was not another dashboard. It was infrastructure - a layer that automatically normalizes incompatible data, resolves identity, and lets organizations buy, sell, enrich and activate data as easily as running a query.
Ten years on, the company employs roughly 29 people, counts Nielsen, TransUnion, Experian, Block and Fanatics among its clients, and has raised more than $20 million. In June 2026, Snowflake named it a Data & Identity "One to Watch" in its Modern Marketing Data Stack report. Small team, outsized footprint - a pattern that tends to follow companies that pick an unglamorous problem and solve it properly.
*Narrative Anywhere runs inside a customer's own cloud, so data does not have to leave the environment it already lives in.
Narrative's tagline - "data that works together is closer than you think" - is also its whole product thesis. Traditional data work is a slog of extract-transform-load pipelines, schema mapping, and manual reconciliation. Narrative's approach is to normalize data at the query level instead, so incompatible schemas and values resolve into a single, usable catalog without the ETL bottleneck.
The engine behind this is Rosetta Stone, a patented, AI-powered component named, fittingly, after the artifact that let scholars finally translate hieroglyphs. Nick Jordan has described it as a "query planner": you define the dataset you need, and it figures out how to fetch that data across suppliers, tables and formats. On top of that sit identity resolution, secure collaboration, enrichment, and cross-channel activation.
"Data that works together is closer than you think."
Narrative collapses a process that used to require an army of data engineers into a guided workflow that runs where the data already lives.
Rosetta Stone translates incompatible schemas and values into one unified catalog at query time.
Identity Orchestrator builds composable identity graphs and unified profiles inside a secure cloud.
Buy, sell and enrich data through the Marketplace - or run it all natively inside your Snowflake.
Connectors push audiences to Meta, Google and Yahoo DSP for cross-channel campaigns.
The normalization engine that maps disparate data into a unified catalog at the query level - killing traditional ETL and schema-mapping work.
Builds unified customer profiles and composable identity graphs inside secure cloud environments for identity resolution.
A Snowflake Native App that runs normalization, identity and marketplace capabilities inside a customer's own Snowflake - no data movement.
Reimagined beyond a data exchange into a hub for data, skills, connectors and AI workflows.
Direct delivery of audiences to destinations like Meta, Google and Yahoo DSP for cross-channel activation.
Tooling for training custom and predictive models on securely collaborated data.
Narrative's customers are the people who feel data friction most acutely: marketers who need audiences fast, data scientists assembling training sets, and enterprises trying to make sense of what they own. Its named client roster punches well above the size of the company itself.
Sectors span martech and adtech, data services, business intelligence and analytics - anywhere identity, enrichment and activation matter.
Most data collaboration tools ask you to copy data into their environment. That is exactly the step enterprises and their legal teams hate. Narrative's differentiator is the opposite: with Narrative Anywhere, identity resolution, audience building, activation and measurement all run inside the customer's own Snowflake - no data movement, no loss of governance.
The second differentiator is the normalization engine. Where competitors treat integration as a services project, Narrative treats it as a query-time problem. That is the difference between weeks of pipeline work and a described dataset that simply resolves.
Narrative has raised more than $20 million from investors including G20 Ventures, Glasswing Ventures and XSeed Capital.
Sources: Crunchbase, PitchBook, company announcements. Figures approximate; total funding reported above $20M.
Nick Jordan founded Narrative in 2016 after a career across Tapad, Adobe and Yahoo. His conviction was that the data industry had solved acquisition and storage but not usability - and that the winning company would be the one that made data usable by default.
Tim Mahlman became CEO in 2023, with Jordan moving to a strategic role. Mahlman came from senior roles at AOL and Verizon Media, and most recently was president of Petabyte Technology, which was acquired by Chewy - a background steeped in the digital-media and data economy Narrative sells into.
Narrative's whole premise is a contradiction most enterprises live with: they own more data than ever, and can use less of it than they'd like.
Nick Jordan starts the company in New York to solve enterprise "data deficiency."
Seed funding from G20 Ventures, Glasswing Ventures and XSeed Capital; Rosetta Stone takes shape.
G20 Ventures leads a round to scale the data collaboration platform.
An additional $4.28M pushes total funding above $20M.
Narrative also partners with Snowflake and The Trade Desk to syndicate data via Snowflake Marketplace.
A Snowflake Native App brings normalization, identity and marketplace into the customer's own cloud.
Relaunched as a composable hub for data and AI work - skills, connectors and workflows.
Named a Data & Identity "One to Watch" in the Modern Marketing Data Stack report.
Narrative sits at the intersection of the data marketplace, the data clean room, and identity resolution - three categories that are quietly converging as data moves onto cloud platforms like Snowflake. Its bet is that the future of data collaboration is native to the cloud, not bolted on beside it.
That places it alongside players such as LiveRamp, Habu, InfoSum and Datavant on the clean-room and identity side, and marketplaces like Datarade and Nomad Data on the commerce side. Narrative's angle - normalization plus in-cloud execution - is what it uses to distinguish itself from tools that either move data or leave the hard integration work to the customer.
The flagship engine, Rosetta Stone, borrows its name from the artifact that finally let scholars read Egyptian hieroglyphs.
You can source data almost like running a database query - describe what you want, and the platform finds it across suppliers.
Identity and audience work runs inside the customer's own Snowflake, so the data technically never leaves home.
Around 29 people support enterprise clients including Nielsen, Experian and Fanatics.
It provides data collaboration infrastructure that automatically normalizes disparate data, resolves identity, and lets companies buy, sell, enrich and activate data - increasingly inside their own cloud environment like Snowflake.
It was founded in 2016 by Nick Jordan. Tim Mahlman, a veteran of AOL and Verizon Media, has been CEO since 2023, with Jordan moving to a strategic role.
Rosetta Stone is Narrative's patented, AI-powered normalization engine that translates incompatible data schemas and values into a unified catalog at the query level, reducing the need for traditional ETL.
Narrative Anywhere runs as a Snowflake Native App, so its capabilities operate inside a customer's Snowflake environment with no data movement. Snowflake named Narrative "One to Watch" in its 2026 report.
The company has raised more than $20M across seed and Series A rounds from investors including G20 Ventures, Glasswing Ventures and XSeed Capital.