Customer data infrastructure provider InfoSum named former Xandr CEO Brian Lesser as the company’s new chairman and chief executive officer. Lesser, who had been serving as executive chairman, will succeed InfoSum founder Nick Halstead, who will become the company’s new chief technical officer. 

Lesser, who previously worked in leadership positions throughout the advertising industry, most recently as the founding CEO of Xandr, said the handoff from Halstead was in the works for months. “He and I had a conversation very early on when he said ‘I am not the long-term CEO of this company because it’s going to be a very big company and that’s not my skillset,’” Lesser says.

Lesser says the move will help re-orient InfoSum away from the mentality of a startup and towards a “midsize fast-growing company” as it expands into new markets and moves away from marketing and advertising and into other industries like financial services and healthcare. Lesser says he will also focus on ensuring the company is well-capitalized as it grows. Earlier this year, InfoSum completed its $15 million Series A funding.

InfoSum sells infrastructure that can manage and parse customer data without needing to move it around to other companies, to a centralized system, or even to InfoSum itself. Instead, all processing is done on the data where it already exists within a customer’s system, creating what InfoSum calls an isolated “bunker” of data. Bunkered information is pseudo-anonymized before it leaves this bunker, ensuring customer privacy, and InfoSum says its infrastructure can detect multiple requests that could de-anonymize the data.

InfoSum will target companies that may be distrustful of external methods of processing data and that do not want to rely on third-party solutions to identify customers, says Lesser. Gaming companies, for instance, may want to share information about customers to create marketplaces or new products, but still retain customer data for themselves. InfoSum also sees connected TV and addressable TV as “two of the hottest areas where we’ve seen interest in the product,” Lesser says. 

Lesser acknowledges that InfoSum’s focus on protecting customer privacy can sometimes be a hard sell for companies, but he says that attitude is changing. “There was a time where you would write your privacy policy...to make it very clear that your objective is not to respect the customer’s data, it was to inform the customer what you plan to do with the data,” Lesser says. Companies are now seeing privacy as part of their business, and even a selling point for some. For companies using InfoSum, “the customer can trust that a company is collecting data in the right way and using data in the right way,” he says.