Following a $50 million infusion of cash Thursday, mobile location vendor xAd appears to be sitting pretty. The money is a combination of equity and debt financing. XAd is not publicly disclosing the split.
According to CEO Dipanshu Sharma, the company doesn’t “have any immediate plans for the funding,” which came courtesy of Institutional Venture Partners, Emergence Capital, Softbank and Silicon Valley Bank. Although Sharma declined to share the company’s valuation, reportage via VentureWire placed xAd’s worth at about $250 million.
“We have enough self-generated profit to fuel our expenses and product leadership,” Sharma said. “However, we’re continually evaluating strategic acquisitions that have potential to further strengthen our market leadership and global scale.”
Sharma would not comment on specifically what type of companies xAd might acquire down the line. When asked to what extent xAd sees itself as a potential acquisition target itself, Sharma basically said that it doesn’t.
“We have had acquisition discussions in the past, but none that we have taken seriously,” he said. “Most companies pursue acquisitions when they are in need of money or are looking for talent, technology or other assets required to make their offering or positioning stronger … Right now, we’re focused on continuing to grow and scale the company on an international level. We’re also focused on further developing our technology, which has enabled us to get to the point we’re at today.”
XAd’s technology collects user location and intent data to try and predict future purchasing behavior. In terms of competition, the company is pitting itself against mega-players like Google and Facebook, both of which have strong location-based functionality in the form of Maps and Places, respectively.
Down the line, Sharma said xAd will focus on “transparency and programmatic buying.” To that end, the company launched a product called Footprints back in April that aims to measure real-time foot traffic for the purposes of mobile location targeting.
Regarding programmatic, Sharma noted that most DSPs “don’t have the ability to fully leverage location,” which he said he sees as a big opportunity for xAd. Over the last six months, xAd has formed partnerships with a number of SSPs, DSPs and agency trading desks in an effort share more location data in ad request calls.
The ultimate goal, Sharma said, is to combine the Footprints data into “these more data-driven automated buying platforms.
Funding aside, it’s been a busy couple of weeks for xAd. Last week, the company announced a partnership with LiveRamp to enable data onboarding to in-app mobile marketing platforms.
