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Santa Monica-based Pixalate today announced plans to offer its real-time ad analytics platform to brands and agencies on a freemium basis; a $4.6 million Series A round led by Javelin Venture Partners, also announced today, will make these plans a reality starting January 2.
Now at no cost, Pixalate allows advertisers to improve performance of their media spends through its cloud-based ad verification and fraud detection technology. With a premium subscription, clients will get more advanced analytical tools and optimized real-time bidding tools.
But no matter what version clients use, Pixalate addresses the major problem they face: real-time bidding fraud is estimated to be as high as 30 percent. Because advertisers have campaigns across a variety of sites (and devices!), it is not only difficult for them to detect this fraud, but also hard for them to aggregate campaign information to optimize spend. This is why Pixalate stepped in back in 2011.
“We not only provide a way to detect all these things, but also do it in real-time,” Board of Advisors member Mike Rudolph said. “There’s really no one else out there who is taking this approach to the ad tech world.”
Other players in the ad tech space, like New York-based DoubleVerify, address either fraud or verification issues, but none offer a “suite of products that cover all of these things,” Rudolph said. Likewise, no one else is offering solutions in real-time, which has become Pixalate’s biggest differentiator.
“It’s one thing to understand that there are problems you have with your campaign, but being able to actually take action on that is critical,” Rudolph said. “And doing it in real-time is important because, particularly if you are doing a programmatic buy or real-time bid, your impressions are happening in real-time.”
The realization that there was a need for a real-time fraud and verification platform came from co-founder and CEO Jalal Nasir, who was looking to solve his own problem when he worked in ad operations at Geeknet in the Bay area. Now Nasir and his 15-person team, which includes co-founder Amin Bandeali, have integrated Pixalate with digital advertising companies like AppNexus, OpenX, MediaMath and Google AdSense to provide the most efficient optimization technology.
So far, clients such as Orange Telecom, Amazon, ReachLocal and Gourmet Ads have gotten on board to use the platform, but Pixalate isn’t stopping there and is looking to continue evolving its technology into 2014, Rudolph said: “Right now, we are building tech to be able to allow more and more efficient real-time optimization of existing campaigns that are out there.”
