What’s in a name? Why Survata is becoming Upwave

By Chris Kelly September 21, 2020

What’s in a name? Why Survata is becoming Upwave

Today I’m excited to share the biggest news we’ve had in a while – that Survata is rebranding to Upwave! To explain our path forward, it’s best to recall our path here.

Like most early-day decisions at a tiny company, our name selection happened rather quickly.  We were two people in an unfurnished apartment office with no customers and no product – not a scenario to spend months selecting a name!

Yet Survata turned out to be the perfect brand as we built out the world’s easiest way to collect consumer data via a survey.  It was a simple, clean, memorable vessel for our story.  It even worked as we built different measurement applications on top of our original data collection platform.

As those applications scaled, though, we became much more than consumer data collection.  We evolved to be the world’s best way to plan, measure, and optimize brand marketing.  We built sophisticated predictive analytics, powerful automated ad campaign visualizations, and integrations with the world’s biggest marketing platforms.  Every month we track billions of ad impressions across computers, phones, smart TVs, even streaming audio devices – all in an anonymous, consumer-privacy friendly manner.  We ingest tens of billions of anonymized data points from the ecosystem’s leading platforms (interestingly, survey data became well under 0.1% of the data we hold in our databases!).  We plug directly in the marketer’s ad server to pull information on ad placements, sites, creatives, and more.   Every night we spin up thousands of servers in the cloud – which to date have built millions of machine learning models, which create automated campaign insights for the world’s largest advertisers.

In short, our original name was underselling our power. So we wanted to speak to our ability to use data to make brand marketing better, to help marketers push their brands up & to the right. 

We wanted a name to communicate the positivity of helping brands ride out of the darkest economic period in decades.

We wanted a name to stress our identity as an analytics company.  We wanted something that still said “startup” while also saying “serious.”

We wanted a name with a “forward-looking” ring to it to reflect the predictive capabilities of our analytics.

“Upwave” captured this, and more.  So starting today, upwave.com is our new home!

We’re excited to continue our journey with a new flag on our ship.  We’re thrilled to spread the news of the Upwave name & brand to our customers, partners, and all other stakeholders.  We’re energized by the new opportunities we know the Upwave brand will create for us.

One last note: It’s probably obvious we’re obsessed with helping brand marketers.  Why?  Because high-quality brand advertising funds not only the videos we watch and the music we hear, but also the journalism that informs us and the information that persuades us.  If our software helps brands better justify their brand marketing investments, we see clear, positive societal effects from this.  This is what motivates us. Thanks for reading, and thanks for continuing to be a part of our story.

Onward and upward!
Chris Kelly
Upwave Founder and CEO