Nanigans builds ad-optimization and analytics software that automates and analyzes social and digital advertising, initially focused on Facebook. The company has been transitioning from a services-and-commission model to a year-long subscription SaaS model, with about 70% of customers already on annual subscriptions and an expectation of 100% by the end of June. Nanigans manages roughly $500 million in annualized ad spend and had been essentially bootstrapped and profitable before this round. It operates from headquarters in Boston with offices in New York, San Francisco, London, Sydney, and an Asia-Pacific team in Singapore. Product roadmap includes expanding beyond Facebook (it added support for Twitter-owned MoPub last fall) while continuing to prioritize and improve the Facebook product. CEO Ric Calvillo has tied the SaaS strategy to longer-term liquidity plans, including a possible public offering in the next two to three years. Nanigans provides a licensable, self-serve tool that lets advertisers buy, intelligently target, and A/B test large Facebook ad campaigns while predicting customer lifetime value to optimize ROI rather than just minimizing CPA. Its predictive modeling engine can deduce and track how much a customer spends, enabling advertisers to prioritize higher-LTV cohorts even if acquisition costs are higher. The platform is used by social gaming and e-commerce customers including eBay, Fab.com, Rue La La, Zynga, GSN, Wooga, Kixeye and Kabam, and it runs hundreds of millions of dollars of Facebook ad spend per year. Revenue grew 6x in 18 months since its prior funding round, and headcount expanded from 15 to more than 100 within a year. Nanigans plans to invest the new funding in R&D—hiring PhD data scientists, advancing its predictive algorithms, and building intuitive UIs on top of Facebook's Ads APIs—and to expand into verticals such as retail and travel. The company reports that over a third of ad spend on its platform targets mobile users, is opening a Singapore office for global expansion, and has $8.85M reported in the bank. Nanigans operates a real-time bidding platform for Facebook that optimizes advertiser spend for downstream actions and lifetime customer value. The company's Ad Engine automates campaign management at scale and optimizes for actions such as Likes, app installs, registrations, virality and purchases. Nanigans is one of the first Official Facebook Ads API Partners and delivers social ads for over 200 customers including Bonobos, CrowdStar, EA, Gilt Groupe, PopCap Games and RockYou. The company serves tens of billions of ad impressions per month and will use the financing to expand its team, product development and partnerships. Nanigans recently made several executive hires to accelerate product development, including a SVP Product, VP Engineering and SVP Operations. It closed a $3M Series A to scale the Ad Engine and expand the team.

Total raised

$33M

Funding rounds

3

Latest round

Series B

Latest activity

Mar 2015