In today’s environment, where customer behavior is fragmented, go-to-market complexity is rising and capital efficiency matters more than ever, data is no longer a back-office function; it's a front-line operating system. Whether you're allocating media spend, refining product strategy, managing sales outreach or building product roadmaps, your ability to harness, activate and learn from data determines how fast, and how intelligently, you can grow your business.
Summit, we seek out and support growth companies that prioritize data as a core operating asset. We’ve seen time and again that companies built around strong data foundations are generally better equipped to scale faster and more efficiently. We believe Summit-backed StackAdapt, a programmatic advertising platform, exemplifies this approach. Since partnering with the company in 2022, we’ve seen StackAdapt scale its own business with data-first discipline, while building a platform designed to empower other companies to do the same.
We believe StackAdapt’s growth story illustrates the importance of three data-driven strategies that we consistently see across high-performing growth companies.
1. Growth Begins with a Data-First Mindset
Some of the most enduring growth companies I’ve worked with don’t treat data as a dashboard or a post-mortem. They treat data as infrastructure, central to how they make decisions, build teams and serve customers.
That mindset has been foundational at StackAdapt. From the start, data have informed many aspects of StackAdapt’s expansion, from the evolution of the platform to how the company enters new markets and structures internal teams. Over the last five years, StackAdapt has grown from 177 employees in Toronto in 2020 to more than 1,500 globally today, with product, hiring and GTM strategies all shaped by real usage patterns, performance feedback and behavioral insight.(1)
That same mindset also powers the StackAdapt platform, offering solutions that help customers scale with data-driven discipline. StackAdapt’s infrastructure was designed from the ground up with data as its foundation and is supported by a robust in-house data science practice. From modeling and machine learning to optimization and experimentation, the company’s data capabilities are deeply embedded in how the platform operates and evolves. Today, the system processes billions of transactions a day, applying machine learning to dynamically optimize media spend based on what’s working, not intuition or assumptions. There’s no manual lever-pulling. It’s machine-led, performance-optimized and constantly learning. For StackAdapt’s customers, this data-first approach helps enable faster testing, smarter scaling and improvement with every campaign.
In today’s landscape, where speed and precision are non-negotiable, business leaders can’t afford to guess. They need systems that help them learn and act.
2. Data Fluency Must Extend Across the Organization
One of the clearest patterns I see across many of our category-leading portfolio companies is that data knowledge and data usage are part of the company culture, not just confined to an analytics team. The best CEOs, CFOs, CMOs, CROs and COOs don’t just look at KPIs, they understand the inputs behind them. They ask better questions. They push their teams to measure what matters. And they use insight, rather than instinct, to guide how they hire, invest and expand.
Data fluency is part of StackAdapt’s DNA. The founding team built the business around data science as a core competency. As the company has scaled, they’ve built an executive team that prioritizes that skillset, one that enables focus, cohesion and operational discipline across geographies and functions.
The StackAdapt platform itself is designed to help customers achieve that same cross-functional data fluency. The platform is used by marketing teams, revenue leaders, third-party agencies and finance organizations, supporting collaboration around a shared source of truth.
We believe that alignment is critical in today’s GTM environment as the lines between marketing and advertising are increasingly blurred. Across our portfolio, we see the importance of data fluency time and again. When data are siloed, execution stalls, but, in our experience, when teams are united around a single view of the customer, growth accelerates.
3. First-Party Data is the Growth Engine and the Moat
As privacy standards continue to evolve and access to third-party data becomes increasingly limited and less reliable, companies must rethink how they reach and retain customers. In this new reality, first-party data becomes a strategic growth lever.
StackAdapt saw this shift early and built for it, creating a platform to help companies to activate their own customer data and combine that data with contextual signals, to inform channel strategies in an effort to optimize performance in real time. This is especially valuable in B2B, where sales cycles can be long, buying committees are complex and relevance across every touchpoint can make or break a deal.
More recently, StackAdapt has expanded its offering to include a lightweight customer data platform (CDP) and email marketing capabilities, allowing customers to activate data across paid and owned channels. The company is not just focused on helping customers run better ads; StackAdapt aims to close the loop between awareness, consideration and conversion.
This same data-driven discipline is applied internally at the company. StackAdapt uses its own first-party data—from product usage to sales cycle velocity—to inform decisions on product roadmap, GTM execution and more. Sales and support insights help shape product development. Marketing data drive messaging refinement. The result is a company that stays in sync with its market and its customers.
Across our portfolio, we see the same theme: the companies best positioned for long-term growth are the ones that own their customer intelligence and know how to use it.
In my experience investing in growth-stage companies over the last two decades, scaling successfully is rarely just about what you build. Your company’s ability to harness, activate and learn from data influences how fast, and how intelligently, you can grow your business. The StackAdapt team applies a data-first mindset in scaling their business and in helping customers to do the same. I believe the platform represents a new generation of MarTech: one that empowers go-to-market teams to operate with precision, coordination and intelligence.
At Summit, we look for companies that scale with purpose, lead with insight and create durable value for their customers. In my view, StackAdapt does all three, offering a blueprint for what data-driven growth can look like when it’s done right.
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(1) This information was provided by StackAdapt and is believed to be reliable and current, but accuracy cannot be guarantee.
The content herein reflects the views and opinions of Summit Partners and is intended for executives and operators considering partnering with Summit Partners. The information herein has not been independently verified. For a complete list of Summit Partners portfolio companies, please click here.
References herein to “expertise” or any party being an “expert” or other particular skillsets are based solely on the belief of Summit Partners and are provided only to indicate proficiency as compared to an average person. Such references should not be construed or relied upon as an indication of future outcomes.
Information herein is as of August 25, 2025.
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