LinkedIn has entered into an agreement to acquire cross-device identity management firm Drawbridge. In a blog post announcing the move, LinkedIn’s VP of product, Tomer Cohen, said the company believed Drawbridge’s team and technology will “allow us to accelerate the capabilities of our Marketing Solutions platform, helping our customers better reach and understand their professional audiences and measure the ROI of their campaigns across mobile and desktop. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

At first glance, the deal looks an odd one, but Drawbridge’s cross-device attribution technology could help LinkedIn track user behaviour and conversion across different devices.

Drawbridge was one of the first companies in the cross-device attribution space. he company was founded in 2011 by Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan, former lead scientist at AdMob, and launched the year after. It uses statistical methods that rely on anonymous data to track people as they move between their smartphones, tablets and PCs, identifying the same user across their various connected devices in probabilistic fashion.  According to its website, the Drawbridge Identity Graph includes more than 1bn consumers across more than 3bn devices and more than 16bn identifiers, and it predicts matches with up to 97.3 per cent precision, validated by Nielsen. 

But it closed down its business in Europe in March last year, two months before the introduction of GDPR, and in May 2018, it sold its US media business to location data firm Gimbal.