Following up from my recent post announcing our investment in Awe.sm, sharing news about two new recent investments in Cross Pixel and PlaceIQ.

Announced last week, kbs+ Ventures invested in Cross Pixel, a transparent audience data provider for advertisers, in a $1.5 MM Series A funding round. Based in NYC, Cross Pixel provides audience data to over 50 Fortune 500 companies to allow them to better target advertising campaigns, drawing on Cross Pixel’s relationships with more than 450 ecommerce sites.

As Darren explains:

“We have been using an increasing amount of data to make marketing decisions for our clients, across planning, buying, research, social, and CRM. With this in mind, we sought out an investment in a data management company who can help us enrich our insights and data access, which led us to Cross Pixel Media,” said Darren Herman, President of kbs+ Ventures and Chief Digital Media Officer of The Media Kitchen and kbs+. “Their unique data offering enables agencies like ours and our brand clients to identify and access high value audiences for insights and to serve them advertising based on their specific interests. Their approach provides a level of transparency, customization and creativity like none other we’ve encountered in the data ecosystem.”

Announced earlier this week, kbs+ Ventures participated in PlaceIQ’s $4.2 MM Series A fundraise, led by new investors U.S. Venture Partners and Valhalla Partners, with participation from existing investors IA Ventures, kbs+ Ventures, and Jerry Neumann. Moving to NYC, PlaceIQ provides location intent data for advertisers to use to find and target campaigns to the right audience at the right time, right place, and right intent.

As GigaOm explains:

PlaceIQ is building an index of profiles on very specific geographic 100-meter tiles of the world. It takes publicly available data, from social information, tweets, and check-ins to cell phone density data, retail information, local events and points of interest and then applies machine learning and sentiment and pattern analysis to create a profile for a specific place that shifts over the course of the day to reflect what kind of people are there.

This enables advertisers to better target mobile users and provide the most contextual and relevant ads based on where they are and what time of day it is. And it allows advertisers to target users anonymously without violating their privacy or tracking them individually.

Taken together, both Cross Pixel and PlaceIQ underscore our vision for the value created by early-stage companies harnessing the massive disruptions created by big data in the advertising and marketing technology landscape. Cross Pixel and PlaceIQ both provide value-added ways for advertisers to find and target the appropriate audiences for their advertising messages to succeed.

They are both “big data” companies, but they aren’t just about the existence of big data sets. They are aggregating and structuring inert data for companies to use in actionable, measurable, and valuable ways. And that’s another example of the big opportunities that gets us excited.

Also: more about kbs+ Ventures.