Participated · Series B · Feb 2025

tvScientific is a performance advertising platform for connected TV (CTV) that focuses on driving measurable outcomes for advertisers. Its core product is a patented suite of technologies around identity, outcome measurement, and ML/AI-driven TV outcome optimization. The company has been issued six patents to date and says it has helped hundreds of advertisers, including Foot Locker, Rare Beauty, EA, Scopely, Dream, Brightside, Earnin, Britbox, Gorjana, and Weight Watchers. The CTV market is growing rapidly by tens of billions of dollars compared to linear TV, and tvScientific aims to position CTV as a performance rival to search and social. With the new funding, tvScientific plans to scale its go-to-market teams and continue building its technology to make performance capabilities table stakes in CTV. The company raised $25.5 million in a Series B to support these plans and expand its customer base. Management targets a tenfold increase in customers within two years as part of its strategy to expand the Performance TV category. tvScientific is a Pasadena, CA–based performance advertising platform for connected TV that enables advertisers to buy and execute performance CTV campaigns with major inventory partners including Paramount+, Hulu, Discovery, ABC, CBS and NBC. The platform introduced the ability to buy CTV campaigns on a Cost-Per-Outcome basis, enabling advertisers to purchase media based on CPA, ROAS, sales and post-CTV campaign traffic rather than simple reach & frequency or MMM models. Customers include Experian, MoneyGram, Crocs, Groupon and Fender. Led by co-founder and CEO Jason Fairchild, the company raised $9.4M in convertible note financing in February 2024. Backers included S4S Ventures, BDMI, Progress Ventures, NBCU/Comcast, Norwest Capital Partners, Aperiam Ventures and Hearst Ventures. The company intends to use the funds to expand operations and accelerate development and product efforts. tvScientific provides a performance advertising platform built for connected TV (CTV) that aims to make TV advertising accessible and measurable for brands and apps of all sizes. Its self-managed solution is custom-built for performance marketers, simplifying and automating TV buying and optimization. The platform leverages large-scale data to prove the actual value of TV advertising. The company plans to use new funding to grow its customer base and continue innovating the product. It also intends to hire across engineering, product, data science, marketing, sales and other departments to support expansion. tvScientific was founded by Bill Gross, Jason Fairchild, Kent Wakeford and David Koye and is based in Pasadena, CA. tvScientific launched a Connected TV buying, measurement, and attribution platform designed to make TV advertising accessible and measurable for businesses of all sizes. The self-serve platform combines fully optimized buying with comprehensive measurement and proprietary deterministic ID technology to match CTV ad exposure to site visitations and performance. It offers advanced audience targeting (over 15K unique customer segments), direct access to more than 90% of premium CTV publishers, and real-time optimization based on direct attribution. tvScientific connects buyers to hundreds of premium CTV inventory sellers and data providers across partners such as SpotX, Magnite, OpenX and Samsung and runs on devices including Samsung, Vizio, and Roku. The company positions itself to capture a portion of the $72 billion TV advertising market and cites 200 million CTV viewers in the U.S. as part of its market opportunity. tvScientific is an Idealab company co-founded by Bill Gross and Jason Fairchild and has raised $1.5 million in seed funding.

Participated · Series B · Apr 2024

ID5 provides a privacy-first identity infrastructure that enables addressable and measurable advertising while protecting user data. Its solutions enable user recognition across media properties and devices and have been adopted by thousands of publishers, advertisers and ad-tech platforms, including Havas Media, New York Post, M6 Publicité, Adobe Advertising platform, OpenX and Eyeota. The company says its identifier supports almost 50% of online advertising transactions, reflecting broad adoption in cookieless environments. Created in 2017, ID5 emphasizes transparent, scalable and GDPR-aware technology to help publishers monetize audiences and advertisers run effective, measurable campaigns. ID5 raised a $20 million Series B to expand its privacy-first advertising identity service and accelerate product innovation ahead of the anticipated end of cookies in 2024. The company plans to continue innovating and expanding its mission to support the entire advertising ecosystem across all channels.

Led · Series A · Aug 2023

Tracer is a data-aggregation and business-insights platform that ingests inputs ranging from advertising and sales metrics to customer data and web traffic, overlays business context, and delivers results to spreadsheets, emails, databases, dashboards and other channels. The technology is data-agnostic and positioned as a simpler, lower-cost alternative to building a modern data stack and multiple point solutions. Tracer does not charge by seat or license, enabling unlimited internal users, and says it delivers cost, time and resource savings. The company has grown steadily and recently eclipsed 200 customers, including Sanofi, Papa Johns, Headspace and Condé Nast. Tracer traces its roots to work inside VaynerMedia in 2015, spun out as an LLC in 2018, and Jeff Nicholson became CEO in 2020. The company plans to use new capital to expand, scale its technology, establish a sales team and enhance client success resources; to date it has raised $30 million.

Participated · Series C · Jul 2022

Sovrn operates a multi-solution publisher technology platform delivering advertising technology, affiliate monetization tools, reader engagement measurement, and privacy-compliant data enrichment. Led by CEO Walter Knapp and based in Boulder, Colorado, the company provides tools for content creators to understand, operate and grow their businesses. Its affiliate suite includes link creation, commerce comparisons, shopping galleries and access to thousands of merchants, while its advertising stack focuses on inventory management and reporting. Since a previous $26M raise in December 2018, Sovrn has acquired three companies, expanded its product portfolio, increased headcount by more than 50% across the US, UK and EU, and added thousands of active customers. Those customers generate hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue using Sovrn’s products. The company plans to use new funding to pursue additional acquisitions and to develop products and services that expand its platform capabilities. sovrn is an ad tech company and partner to almost 50,000 websites on the independent web, offering tools and services to help publishers understand audiences and monetize through programmatic advertising. The company processes about one billion ad transactions every day across its publisher network. sovrn positions itself as an advocate for independent publishers and supplies analytics, growth and engagement tools alongside monetization services. Management plans to use new capital to accelerate both organic expansion and inorganic growth opportunities. Financially, sovrn reported year‑over‑year revenue growth of 90% in the second quarter and has delivered four consecutive quarters of positive EBITDA. The company is headquartered in Boulder, Colo., with offices in Denver, San Francisco and New York. Lijit Networks builds custom site search and advertising solutions for online publishers, operating a programmatic advertising services platform and publisher network. Its network includes more than 17,000 websites, about 1.5 billion pageviews per month and over 106 million unique visitors per month. The company reports that transactions on its advertising services platform have grown 74% since Q4 2010. Lijit was founded in June 2006. The article reports the company has raised $28.3 million to date. No future product plans are specified in the article. Lijit Networks supplies search and content-discovery tools to individual publishers, commercial websites and content networks to surface reader intent, behavior, content and demographics. Its products aim to enhance engagement, lengthen time on site and increase page views. The company launched an Advertising Services platform which it plans to accelerate with new capital. The recent financing will also support growth of Lijit’s publisher network. Lijit is incorporated in 2006 and is based in Boulder, CO. To date the company has raised $17M in total capital.

Participated · Series A · Jun 2022

Veritonic positions itself as the independent standard for cultural and creative intelligence, combining Creative, Brand Lift, and Attribution measurement in one adaptive platform. Fueled by millions of consumer and fan insights worldwide, the software helps brands such as Pepsi, Indeed, and CBS forecast, prove, and scale ROI. The technology allows marketers to know, rather than guess, which creative executions and cultural collaborations drive measurable impact. Veritonic’s data capabilities are now being extended to the music and entertainment sector through a new partnership with Authentic Intelligence, giving brands first-look access to emerging talent and cultural IP and the ability to quantify related ROI. This collaboration aims to shift brands from mere sponsorship to ownership of cultural moments. No revenue, user, or other operating metrics were disclosed in the article. Future efforts will center on integrating Authentic Intelligence’s cultural access with Veritonic’s measurement stack to create earlier, smarter investments in cultural partnerships.