Smaato Raises USD 25 Million for Global Mobile RTB ad-exchange and SSP Platform
Smaato has raised USD 25 million in Series E funding to fuel growth, operations and development of its next-generation platform focused on self-serve automation. Singapore Press Holdings Ltd (SPH), participated in the round along with Aeris CAPITAL, EDBI and other existing shareholders.
“Approximately 65 per cent of our publishers want to monetise mobile apps and the rest is mobile websites. With roughly 466 per cent year-to-year growth in programmatic in-app advertising spend, mobile app developers want to have full control of their inventory and data in a self-serve model. As such, we will use this new funding to build out our next-generation SPP platform that will allow for these controls and automation of monetisation on scale across more than 270+ demand sources,” Ragnar Kruse, CEO and co-founder of Smaato.
Smaato is the leading global mobile RTB ad exchange (SMX) helping mobile app developers and publishers increase ad revenues worldwide. It owns and operates the leading global mobile RTB ad exchange and SSP. Smaato’s Publisher platform (SPP) and SMX Real-time bidding ad-exchange has rapidly grown its global footprint since January 2011 (Smaato’s last funding period), with 11,686 publishers at the time, to now 78,000 publishers who are able to monetise their inventory across 270 and above Ad Networks and Demand Side Platforms. SMX serves over 90 billion ad impressions per month to over 450M unique visitors in US, EMEA and APAC regions.
Singapore Press Holdings is the largest media company in Singapore listed on the Singapore Stock Exchange with revenues of USD 991m (SD 1,239m) in 2013. SPH publishes 19 newspaper titles and over 100 magazine titles. Beyond print, SPH’s suite of digital products includes online editions of newspapers and magazines, as well as mobile applications, online classifieds, financial portals, and other digital investments. The new funds from the investors come at a time when there is large demand from global brands for access to regional publisher inventory through programmatic (RTB), which involves online or mobile advertising inventory being bought and sold programmatically through instantaneous auctions. This aligns with Smaato’s plan of launching private exchanges controlled by top publishers in APAC looking for automated methods to run premium advertising campaigns.
