AdRoll increases Dublin headcount target

Online advertising platform company AdRoll expects to employ 120 people in its Dublin office by the end of the year, with the San Francisco-headquartered firm having increased its planned headcount from an earlier target of 100.

"We're a little bit ahead of our growth plans," says president and co-founder Adam Berke.

A $70 million funding round secured in April has helped it “control our own destiny”, while also giving it the ability to “double down” on its technological experiments: one of its board members calls its cushion of funds “screw-up capital”, he says.

AdRoll – which is in a “hyper-growth” phase, according to Berke – currently employs 65 people in Dublin (its Europe Middle East and Asia EMEA headquarters) and it is set to move to new premises in Burlington Plaza next month.

Though he cautions that “no one knows what the mobile world will look like in five years’ time”, Berke forecasts that advertisers will soon catch up with media consumption trends and migrate a bigger chunk of spending to mobile.

Google, Facebook, Twitter and "sleeping giants" like Amazon and Apple are also in the game and are building "walls" around their profile data in a way that is unhelpful to a platform like AdRoll, which wants to "be Switzerland, the neutral party", as Berke puts it, in a highly targeted, data-driven industry.

It is nevertheless healthy that Google finally has a “legitimate competitor” in the shape of Facebook, Berke adds.

“If I’m an advertiser, I don’t want Google to run the world and I don’t want Facebook to run the world either.”