Online advertising company AdRoll has secured $70 million investment which it plans to use to go global, building on the interest in advertising technology.
The company is a pioneer of online advertising retargeting, which enables advertisers to show ads to users who have already visited their site or viewed their products while browsing the web. It recently established its Europe Middle East and Asia (EMEA) headquarters in Dublin.
It employs 50 people, but aims to increase this to 100 by year end, after a move to larger offices at Burlington Plaza.
Chief executive Aaron Bell said the firm's expansion in Ireland coincided with more than 250 per cent growth in EMEA customers since March 2013.
Expand portfolio
He said the company would use the money to expand its product portfolio, and deepen its device offerings in order to reach customers on mobile devices. "In just a few years, retargeting has become as essential as search engine marketing for every digital marketer. The new funding lets us hit the gas on our ambitious vision to more broadly become the one platform for companies to . . . understand their customers and reach them wherever they go," Mr Bell added.
He said AdRoll has 15,000 customers in more than 100 countries and a revenue run rate of $150 million.
The funding round was led by Foundation Capital, with new investors including Institutional Venture Partners, Northgate Capital, Performance Equity and Glenmede. They join existing investors Merus Capital, Accel Partners and Paypal co- founder Peter Thiel.
Spend
Foundation Capital general manager Charles Moldow said display advertising spend attributed to real-time bidding is expected to exceed $9 billion by 2017.
“A very select group of advertising technology companies are poised to capture the majority of that spend,” he said.
Adroll specialises in targeted adverts to the vast inventories of social networks, search engines and traditional media sites. For example, you could be looking up a holiday to Spain but log off before booking anything. When you go back online, there's a high chance you'll see ad s for Spanish holidays.
Flashpoint:
Dublin-based advertising technology firm Flashpoint is seeking to raise £2 million to introduce a new management platform for social media campaigns.
The new platform, Bionic, is designed to make it easier for advertising agencies to manage social media campaigns, automating much of the process.
It also removes the need for agencies to engage third parties to help run the campaigns, giving them greater control and also cutting down on costs.
Flashpoint, which is chaired by former rugby international Ciarán Fitzgerald, claims its research has shown that the new platform could save up to 60 per cent on labour when managing these campaigns by removing the need to analyse much of the data to see which ads are performing the best.
“Our product will allow you manage a large volume of ads in a large volume of campaigns, and it will place bids for you around the clock. Bids are constantly changing; our product will judge what the best bid is,” chief executive Paul Ward said.
The series A funding round is already being backed by Enterprise Ireland.
