TripleLift closed $10.5 million in Series B funding Thursday, led by Edison Partners. The in-feed native advertising company will use the funds to double its workforce from 50 to 100 employees and expand internationally, starting in Europe with the UK.
The company will also devote a portion to research and development. “My hope is that these resources allow us to stay far ahead of those players,” said co-founder and chief strategy officer Ari Lewine. “It’s crucial to maintain our lead and roll out new products.”
Over the past year, TripleLift has focused on both native programmatic and direct-sold native placements. To facilitate the former, it plugged into the major DSPs using the newly formed OpenRTB 2.3 standard. After launching with Microsoft Store in the fall, it now has 100 advertisers in the program.
But because the native market is new, fill rates are low. Thus, TripleLift enables publishers to direct sell in-feed placements themselves, with Condé Nast’s Food Innovation Group an early partner in that arena.
Because the demand side’s programmatic connections give it scalability, TripleLift is focusing on building its supply. In the past year, it’s grown from under 100 publishers to 1,400 publishers. It’s adding 30 to 40 publishers a week.
Native’s attractiveness on mobile has also given TripleLift traction with publishers. “Mobile has been extremely important to our business,” Lewine said. “It’s been a catalyst for some of our massive growth this year, because in-feed ads are emerging as the standard for mobile.”
TripleLift posted revenue growth of 533% year over year since the company’s founding in 2012. TripleLift raised $2.1 million in seed funding in March 2013 and $4 million in Series A funding last March.
Edison Partners invested because it believed TripleLift “understood the virtues of the programmatic media world,” said Ryan Ziegler, a partner at Edison who leads the interactive marketing and digital media practice, along with the needs of publishers.
TripleLift’s technology allows a “beautiful ad to be rendered in any format on a publisher’s terms,” Ziegler said. He projects continued triple-digit growth for the company.
