VideoAmp, the integrated TV operating system for advertising, today announced it has raised $21.4 million in a Series B funding round led by Mediaocean, with additional investment from German media giant RTL Group, GoAhead Ventures, StartUp Capital Ventures, Anthem Venture Partners, Wavemaker Partners & Simon Equity Partners. This round brings the total funds raised by the company to $36.6 million.
While focusing on product rollout over the last 18 months, VideoAmp achieved approximately 400% revenue growth from 2016 to 2015 and is already pacing at nearly 500% revenue growth from H1 2016 to H1 2017. The company scaled its TV OS for advertising to agency holding companies and content owners to unify the planning, packaging and activation of linear TV and digital video campaigns across screens. The four drivers of their growth were using digital audiences (or "Advanced Currencies") to plan linear TV, allocate upfront linear TV units, programmatically buying media across linear TV/OTT/digital channels, and reporting on de-duplicated reach and frequency within a single fully self-serve interface.
"VideoAmp has been 100 percent focused on solving the challenges of linear TV and digital video convergence since the day we founded the business in 2014," said Ross McCray, Co-Founder & CEO, VideoAmp. "I believe our singular focus and engineering first approach has been instrumental to our growth and a key advantage in the marketplace. Two-thirds of our employees are technical and we don't have the legacy business models that hinder and distract like our competitors. We will be investing the lion's share of capital from this round to further expand our engineering team and license additional first party data sets as new inputs into our data science projects."
In May 2017, VideoAmp and Mediaocean (a Vista Equity Partners portfolio company), announced a first-of-its-kind partnership that creates a fully integrated linear TV planning, allocation and optimization solution for the upfront and scatter markets for agencies and brands by VideoAmp integrating into a read/write API within Mediaocean's Spectra product. This groundbreaking integration improved the methods available to optimize committed network television buys, which are often the most strategic portion of a brand's budget.
"Our investment in VideoAmp is incredibly strategic," said Bill Wise, Co-Founder & CEO of Mediaocean. "Mediaocean has been the preeminent technology behind television advertising for five decades. However, media convergence and shifting consumer habits are changing the advertising landscape. This investment, and the software solutions we create together, will ensure that our customers benefit from secular shifts in advertising from traditional ad sales to programmatic and to audience-based buying and selling across devices. Mediaocean plans on being the preeminent technology for another five decades and beyond - and our investment in VideoAmp is an important chess move for us."
In conjunction with the investment from Mediaocean, Mr. Wise join's VideoAmp's Board of Directors to provide the company with mentorship and strategic guidance.
Through its world-class software, VideoAmp is bringing efficiencies into an inefficient market. The company is changing the way advertisers and content owners plan, buy, package and measure the success of all video advertising investment, regardless of where or how it's displayed on screen, including de-duplicating and targeting methods that reach broadcast TV, VOD, OTT, desktop, and mobile audiences. Over the last year, VideoAmp structured over 41 strategic partnerships in the space, including Mediaocean, comScore, Nielsen, Comcast's FreeWheel, Publicis Groupe's Mediavest|Spark, Omnicom Group, Horizon Media, LiveRamp, Neustar, SpotX, Clypd and many others.
"VideoAmp's strong adoption across a diverse set of great customers reflects its position as a critical TV and video advertising technology platform," noted Rhys Nolke, SVP Strategy of RTL and VideoAmp board member. "Discerning advertisers and agencies and broadcasters in the US and Europe increasingly view VideoAmp as the platform of choice for planning, buying, packaging and measuring cross-device video campaigns amidst an ever-evolving and extremely fragmented media landscape."
