Adelphic has mobile programmatic on the brain – which makes sense for a mobile DSP.
The company said Wednesday that it had closed its Series B to the tune of $11 million in a round led by Blue Chip Venture Co., Google Ventures and Matrix Partners, bringing its total funding to $23 million.
Adelphic – which was founded by the many of the same people responsible for iAd, née Quattro – is earmarking the cash for more development around its cross-device targeting solutions, as well as a push into Europe and APAC.
“Right now, most media plans are put together on a channel-by-channel basis – something separate for mobile, for radio, for broadcast, for print, for out-of-home,” said Adelphic CEO Michael Collins. “But there’s a significant shift happening right now from channel-focused buying to an audience-focused approach, where it’s not about buying mobile, it’s about reaching a specific group and having a seamless dialogue with them wherever they consume media.”
Adelphic’s current cross-device identification technology uses a combination of deterministic and probabilistic methodologies to get the job done. It’s not a matter of either/or, Collins said.
“We’re not choosing sides because that can be quite limiting, actually,” he said. “We’re not dependent on any one piece of information. Our method is to get to scale by listening to and ingesting as broad a set of signals as possible.”
What, then, of the value of high-profile deterministic players like Facebook and Google?
“Deterministic identifiers are great, but there will always be a set of inventory and users you can’t access, and even companies like Google and Facebook might only get a percentage of market coverage,” he said. “It’s also very important to realize that, at the end of the day, those companies are publishers. They own inventory and there’s an inherent conflict of interest there. We have inventory from many suppliers.”
In terms of expanding its global footprint, Adelphic has some pretty ambitious plans for Europe and APAC. The company, whose headcount stands at 39 employees spread across New York, Chicago, Boston and, shortly, San Francisco, has London and Singapore locations planned for the new year.
The London office, set to open its doors in Q1 2015, will start off with three employees, a number Collins said could quadruple if everything goes according to plan. The Singapore office is slated to open in Q2 of next year.
Adelphic’s client base includes the trading desks at many large, multinational holding companies, including Havas, Publicis Groupe, Horizon Media and Amnet, the desk at Dentsu. As budgets shift to programmatic, Collins said Adelphic aims to take its existing agency relationships and expand internationally.
“The programmatic wave accelerated fast in the US, but it’s also accelerated very quickly in Europe, especially [in countries like] the UK and France,” he said.
But APAC is its own animal.
“I’d actually say that APAC is a few different animals,” Collins said. “China is an animal unto itself, India and the subcontinents are the same and then there’s Australia and Southeast Asia. That said, we see the environment in APAC and in Europe as similar to the US in terms of programmatic – they’re just on a slightly different timetable in terms of maturity.”
Correction: A previous version of this story listed Adelphic’s total funding as $12 million.
