The Founder Story of JENTIS

Looking back to the foundation of a company is always a proof of how much passion, courage but also coincidences shape real entrepreneurship. What needs to happen, that 5 guys decide to put their big bet on a joint mission and start working day and night to create a new innovative business without a plan B?

It all started with the underlying belief that data tracking was fundamentally broken and it needed to be reinvented from scratch. The way data tracking on the internet is mainly done is called client side tracking.
Despite being easy to set up and a kind of gold standard, it has proven to be a dead end (due to the end of third party cookies and privacy first landscape).

However an immense industry has been built based on this data capture technology feeding online marketing stacks of any professional website out there. A bold move to go all in…

Data tracking inaccuracies got bigger

The pioneering work of JENTIS goes back to the year 2016. Thomas, an entrepreneur by heart, running an Agency called Webrocket, which he founded a couple of years beforehand, was dealing with one of his biggest clients – the XXXLutz group / second biggest furniture retailer in Europe. Together with Christian and Walter – both later founding members of JENTIS and those days employees at Webrocket – have investigated data tracking inaccuracies got bigger and bigger over time. The reason in 2016 was mainly driven by ad blockers which was supposed to be just the beginning of bad data quality for Online Marketers.

Long story short – Thomas, Christian and Walter started researching available solutions on the market to solve this issue. As they could not find any tool, they committed themselves to start experimenting and coding on a prototype. Needless to mention the techie talents of this core team was a perfect mixture of data tracking experts combined with the skills of being great software developers and passionate about finding a sustainable solution for this identified problem.

3 inherent technical challenges needed to be solved.

First, get data from any browser engagement with a website to the website owner without being blocked by any 3rd party software while respecting the user consent.
Second, once the website owner has full data sovereignty over their website, data also needs to be shared with 3rd party advertising, analytics & storage tools from the ecosystem like Google, Facebook, Adobe,… .
Third, to make it scalable and affordable to master the challenges like Black Friday traffic peaks.

In 2019 their technology and development of the prototype was giving a lot of hope to be more than just a problem fix but had a lot of attributes to become a real product, the team started to get a first client to test the system under pressure.

About the same time with the first JENTIS client, Thomas and Klaus – later to become both Co-CEOS, who have known each other for a couple of years, started a discussion about the opportunities this innovation could bring as well as the necessities and threats. The background of Klaus as X-Googler, entrepreneur and more than 20 years of experience in various commercial roles with large corporations brought a lot of new ideas, what and how to approach this growth challenge. At this stage the fifth guy Robert – a financial and controlling expert and more than 20 years working together with Klaus at in total 5 companies completed the founder team of JENTIS.

With this diverse set of skills and experience and the 2 initial groups of people they decided to team up for the foundation of a new company, to incorporate the intellectual property and start raising investor funds.

Five entrepreneurs started their venture

In 2020, at the end of February the company registration took place and five extraordinarily committed entrepreneurs started their venture. As a side note the timing was certainly very unfortunate because only days after the inception of JENTIS GmbH the COVID pandemic has led to a shut down in Austria and all around the world. With focus, commitment and tenacity we solved this unprecedented challenge early on and carried on working.

The founder spirit and first hirings have enabled the start up to gain momentum from the first day and steadily grow the business to a meantime very remarkable international team of hand picked 40+ team members in mid of 2022 – only 2,5 years later.

On our way we have had the pleasure and fortune to meet many great people on client-, partner-, and agency-side, and understand the value created by the JENTIS technology along with the commitment of the JENTs – as we call our team members – to make things happen and to move the needle.

“In the financial sector, trust is an indispensable prerequisite for a successful customer relationship. For us, this also includes the trust of our customers in the legally compliant handling of their data at all times and the best possible protection. With the JENTIS solution, we now have the opportunity to optimally combine data value creation and data protection.”
Olaf Peter Poenisch – CEO Santander Consumer Bank Austria

Stay tuned how the story continues ….!