Tate Blahnik

Co-Founder & CTO Retention.com

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Tate Blahnik is a co-founder and the chief technology officer of Retention.com, the company now trading as “R!” and describing itself as an identity data business rather than a marketing application. Its technology resolves anonymous website traffic into person-level records and sells that identity layer both as real-time APIs and as bulk flat files to advertising, marketing and data platforms. Blahnik founded the company in 2019 alongside Adam Robinson and Diana Ross — a team the company characterises as three email industry veterans, each with more than fifteen years on the vendor side of marketing technology — and it has grown from a single product, GetEmails, into a group spanning consumer and business identity. He is a repeat technical co-founder: before Retention.com he built and ran engineering at Robly Email Marketing for nearly a decade.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded Retention.com in 2019 with Adam Robinson and Diana Ross, as named on the company’s own story page.
• Launched GetEmails in 2019, one of the first platforms to identify previously anonymous website visitors and convert that traffic into actionable email audiences — the product that became Retention.com.
• Part of the team that extended the technology into B2B in 2024 with the launch of RB2B, turning anonymous website traffic into sales-ready leads and company intelligence.
• Has helped build the underlying asset over more than seven years of continuously acquiring, enriching and developing identity datasets connecting people, businesses and digital activity across the web, in the company’s own description.
• Co-founder and chief technology officer of Robly Email Marketing from 2012 to 2021, a nine-year run at a single email marketing platform that is still operating.
• Earlier co-founded Refund Geeks (2017) and worked as Senior Executive Engineering Architect at MedExpert from 2007 to 2012. Both rest on aggregator profiles rather than primary sources.

Professional Journey

Blahnik’s career has been spent almost entirely in email and identity — the two are more closely related than they sound, since an email address has long been the most durable cross-site identifier available to marketers. He worked as a senior engineering architect at MedExpert from 2007 to 2012 before co-founding Robly Email Marketing in 2012, where he served as chief technology officer until 2021. Robly was a conventional email service provider competing on deliverability and open rates; it is still trading. Along the way, in 2017, he co-founded Refund Geeks.

In 2019 he co-founded what became Retention.com with Adam Robinson and Diana Ross. Their first product, GetEmails, took an unusual position: rather than helping companies send better email to people who had already given them an address, it identified previously anonymous website visitors and made them addressable. That inverted the usual order of operations in email marketing and found a large audience among direct-to-consumer retailers. GetEmails grew into Retention.com, which the company says came to serve thousands of businesses.

The more consequential shift came later. By the company’s own account, the founders concluded that “the real opportunity wasn’t just in the applications — it was in the identity and data powering them.” In 2024 they launched RB2B, applying the same resolution technology to business visitors and producing sales-ready leads rather than email audiences. Today the group presents itself as R!, an identity data company selling through APIs and flat files into advertising, marketing and data platforms, with a stated mission to “build the identity layer that powers the next generation of marketing, sales, and AI applications” — a bet that as AI systems proliferate, accurate identity becomes the constraint on what they can usefully do.

Education

Stanford University

No degree or field of study could be established from any source that is not a data aggregator. A prior version of this profile asserted a BS in Computer Science; that specificity has been removed pending a source, and only the institution is retained.