AtData

Yes. AtData (formerly TowerData) is an enterprise-facing email-intelligence and identity-resolution data broker. Its proprietary database covers more than 10 billion email addresses worldwide and an estimated 98% of active North American email accounts. Customers (mostly marketers, advertisers, and fraud-prevention teams) buy email verification, append, demographic enrichment, and risk-scoring data. AtData has no consumer-search page; the data lives in enterprise APIs and data-license agreements. AtData has historically registered as a data broker with the Vermont Secretary of State.

AtData has been owned by Experian since February 2026. Experian's 2026 annual report dates the completed deal to February 18 and puts the price at $225 million. Before that, AtData was backed by private-equity firm TZP Group, which originally invested in FreshAddress in March 2018. AtData itself was formed in October 2021 by merging TowerData (launched 2001 in New York) with FreshAddress (founded 1999, Boston area). Tom Burke was AtData's CEO at the time of the deal.

Yes. Experian completed its acquisition of AtData on February 18, 2026, for $225 million, according to Experian's 2026 annual report. Tom Burke was AtData's CEO at the time of the deal. Before the deal, AtData was backed by private-equity firm TZP Group, which first invested in FreshAddress in March 2018. See the Experian profile for the parent-company context and the Background section above for the full merger and acquisition timeline.

Experian's stated rationale is that the email address has become the most durable consumer identifier in a cookie-deprecation world, and AtData has one of the deepest US email-data graphs available: 2.4 billion email identity linkages, 80 billion+ emails verified historically, 150 billion+ monthly email-activity signals, and profile coverage on roughly 98% of the active emails it observes. Jeff Softley (CEO of Experian North America) described the deal as bringing "deep email intelligence into our platform" and feeding Experian's AI strategy. The acquisition strengthens Experian's identity-verification, fraud-decisioning, and marketing products by layering email signals on top of existing credit-side and identity-graph data, a bet that email-anchored identity resolution will be a core post-cookie advertising and fraud-prevention layer.

AtData maintains an email-anchored identity graph built from email addresses, alternate emails tied to the same person, postal addresses, phone numbers, demographic attributes, lifestyle and inferred-interest segments, email-engagement signals (open behavior, list-quality scores), risk-scoring data, domain and IP analytics, and email-age tracking used for fraud prevention. The company describes the data as supporting both marketing personalization and fraud-prevention use cases. Products include SafeToSend, SafeToTrust, List Guard, Email Append, Postal Append, Website Visitor ID, Email Identity File, Alternate Email File, and Open Score Intelligence.

AtData's published SafeToSend (email validation) pricing is tiered by volume:

• 5,000 credits: $0.008 per credit
• 50,000 credits: $0.007 per credit
• 100,000 credits: $0.006 per credit
• 500,000 credits: $0.005 per credit
• Above 500K: contact AtData sales for custom rates

A third-party software directory snapshot from October 2024 also listed packaged tiers, starting with a Free Trial covering 100 verifications, Batch Validation starting at $0.01 per input at 25,000-input volume, and a Monthly Subscription starting at $100.00/month that adds the real-time API and integrations with major ESPs and marketing platforms. Larger enterprise data-licensing contracts (the full email-anchored identity graph, append products, fraud-scoring APIs at scale) are negotiated per customer with no public list price. For individual consumers exercising opt-out rights, the suppression at instantdata.atdata.com/optout is free.

For email validation and verification specifically, the direct competitors are ZeroBounce, Kickbox, NeverBounce, BriteVerify (a Validity product), Webbula, and Emailable, all offering real-time email-list cleaning, risk scoring, and bulk validation at comparable volume tiers. For email-anchored identity resolution at scale, the closest peer is LiveRamp (NYSE: RAMP; Publicis agreed to acquire it in May 2026, pending); Acxiom (Omnicom-owned) and Epsilon (Publicis-owned) cover the broader marketing-data space and are also profiled in this directory. Now that Experian owns AtData, Experian Marketing Services' own ConsumerView marketing-data product is the obvious in-house alternative offered by the same parent. None of these alternatives is a one-stop equivalent to AtData's full email-data stack, but together they cover the verification, validation, and identity-resolution use cases individually.

Yes, and it's one of the easiest opt-outs in this directory. AtData runs an opt-out portal at instantdata.atdata.com/optout where you submit your email address, first name, last name, street address, city, state, country, and ZIP. Click Submit and the request is acknowledged on the spot, with no email verification step and no link to click later. The opt-out covers targeted advertising, sale of personal data, profiling for significant decisions, and direct-marketing processing; it isn't deletion. AtData also accepts data-subject-rights requests by email at privacy@atdata.com or by phone at 833-293-0973. California residents can also make a CCPA deletion request through the privacy team. See our AtData removal guide for the field-by-field walkthrough with screenshots.

One that we found: in 2024 Atlas Data Privacy Corporation sued AtData under New Jersey's Daniel's Law, and the case was sent back to New Jersey state court in November 2024. Neither the FTC nor any state Attorney General has announced enforcement against the company. There's no consumer Better Business Bureau profile, no public data-breach disclosure, and no class-action settlement on record. The relevant regulatory framework is state-level privacy law (CCPA / CPRA for California consumers, plus the growing list of state comprehensive-privacy laws) and Vermont's Data Broker statute, which has historically required AtData / TowerData to register annually with the Vermont Secretary of State.

It doesn't say. AtData doesn't present itself as a Consumer Reporting Agency under the Fair Credit Reporting Act. The data is marketing and fraud-prevention data, not consumer reports, and the AtData terms of service prohibit use for FCRA-covered decisions (employment screening, tenant screening, credit, insurance). Experian acquired AtData in February 2026. An opt-out submitted to AtData covers AtData's data only, not Experian's credit file.