Data and technology company Experian has announced the acquisition of AtData, a provider of “verified” email insights with coverage spanning more than 10 billion email addresses globally.
With the deal, Experian said it aims to strengthen its identity and fraud capabilities. AtData’s technology helps brands and marketers – think Adidas, The New York Times, Skims, and more – validate email addresses and use them more confidently as an identity signal for targeting consumers online.
On the fraud side, stronger email validation can reduce risk and lower fraud-related costs by identifying invalid, risky, or synthetic addresses earlier in the process.
Why This Matters:
Email is one of the most persistent identity signals in advertising and marketing. It powers logins, loyalty programs, CRMs, and cross-channel targeting. But it’s also easy to corrupt.
Consumers mistype addresses. Some intentionally use throwaway emails to unlock discounts or gated content. Bots flood sign-up forms with synthetic or short-lived domains. And even legitimate emails decay over time as people change jobs or abandon inboxes. The result: higher bounce rates, wasted spend, weaker sender reputation, and increased fraud risk.
In other words, email-based identity is powerful — but fragile.
AtData addresses this through layered verification. It runs syntax and domain checks, performs mailbox-level validation, flags disposable and catch-all domains, and screens for spam traps and risky activity. It also applies behavioral signals and risk scoring so brands can decide whether to block, suppress, segment, or monitor an address — essentially, email hygiene at scale.
For Experian, this strengthens a key identity input. Email often serves as the anchor across onboarding, authentication, fraud prevention, and marketing workflows. By improving the accuracy and risk scoring of email data, Experian can enhance match rates, reduce fraud exposure earlier in the funnel, and support more reliable digital engagement. It also gains access to a database spanning more than 10 billion email addresses.
Experts React:
Here are some takes on the deal from X, along with a post from AtData:
Our Take:
There’s been notable M&A activity over the past week, including Infillion’s acquisition of Catalina. The shared theme? Data.
Owning data is increasingly important. But data alone isn’t enough — companies also need the tools to manage it, organize it, and improve its quality. Access to data is valuable; access to verified data is more valuable. That’s where AtData fits.
This echoes what we said about the Infillion–Catalina deal just yesterday:
“Over the past year, DMPs, onboarding platforms, and audience data providers have increasingly been absorbed into larger stacks. The pattern is clear: data infrastructure sits upstream, feeding the AI and activation layers downstream. So, we expect more deals to own the upstream portion in the coming months.”
So, yeah, the Experian–AtData deal may be another example of that. Cool to see.
