On Thursday, French AI startup Olyzon (pronounced “all eyes on” – more on that in a bit) announced $5 million in additional seed funding led by US-based venture capital firm Cassius Capital.
Ventech and Eurazeo also contributed to the round, as well as a Who’s Who list of ad tech angel investors that includes Criteo’s former president Greg Coleman and former Madison Logic CEO Tom O’Regan.
This new round comes almost one year after Olyzon’s first seed funding in July, and shortly after the company announced its expansion into the US market in April.
Co-Founder and CEO Jules Minvielle, who also co-founded persona-based targeting company Ogury in 2014, told AdExchanger that starting fresh with this new venture has allowed Olyzon to incorporate emerging digital technologies into its product from the jump, rather than bolting features on after the fact.
“Every company in the ad tech space is going to launch a CTV offering and add some AI to what they do – but it’s not the same,” Minvielle said. “We are native in AI and native in CTV.”
All eyez on Olyzon
Olyzon tackles two major challenges in the CTV advertising industry, said Minvielle.
The first is that larger brands and agencies are still underinvesting in CTV due to a lack of transparency. Secondly, full-screen, interruptive video ads simply aren’t as effective as they once were.
Where the latter is concerned, Olyzon offers scalable versions of home screen, ad squeeze-back and content squeeze-back formats (to borrow the IAB Tech Lab’s recently defined terminology), which can be augmented with interactive assets for viewers to engage with.
But first, those ads need to reach the correct audiences to begin with. Olyzon uses AI models powered by OpenAI and Google’s Gemini to analyze TV show content and metadata on the supply side, as well as to extract assets from RFPs and first-party user information on the client side. The models can then combine all the available data to create contextually relevant segments.
Minvielle also demonstrated to AdExchanger how Shakur, Olyzon’s internal chatbot-style agent – which is personified as a tiny robot named for American rap legend Tupac – can generate complex campaign briefs and show-level inclusion lists from basic inputs, such as brand names and target audience demographics.
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Even Olyzon’s company name is a nod to 2Pac’s legacy, specifically his fourth studio album “All Eyez on Me.”
“We want advertisers to bring back all their eyes on TV,” said Minvielle. “Now that it’s connected [TV], it’s the most powerful screen that they can leverage for their advertising and marketing campaigns.”
(In the three decades since his death, Tupac Shakur has been the subject of numerous incongruous tech industry tributes. Remember the 2012 Coachella hologram?)
Party in the USA
Anyway, back to Olyzon, its agents are already pretty good at analyzing content and taking small actions based on human prompting, Minvielle said. But they aren’t yet capable of fully developing creative assets or taking full responsibility of a campaign, he added.
For that, there still needs to be a flesh-and-blood person behind the wheel.
Still, Olyzon claims that its clients, including major brands like L’Oréal, Red Bull and Mastercard, are seeing their campaigns achieve an average 97% view-through rate and 32% ad recall, both of which are higher than typical benchmarks.
Olyzon plans to use its additional funding to rapidly expand its US team, which so far includes SVP of Sales Zach Sorscher. Minvielle himself is planning a move to the New York office from France, although the company will still maintain its data engineering and data science teams in Paris.
There are so many headlines about people losing their jobs to AI in the name of efficiency. But, in this case at least, expansion means bringing on more human employees.
“We need more people on the ground,” said Minvielle, who highlighted the importance of finding the right people at a quick enough pace to capitalize on the company’s newfound momentum. “That’s the biggest challenge.”
