The Venture Codex

Participated · Series A · Nov 2015

VideoAmp offers currency-grade measurement, planning and optimization tools that combine Set-Top Box and Smart TV ACR inputs to create a large, weighted dataset for cross-screen media measurement. Its platform produces reach, frequency and attribution insights and powers an advanced media currency product intended to redefine how media is valued, bought and sold. VideoAmp reports a dataset of nearly 40 million households and more than 60 million devices in the U.S. and says it has 13 major linear and streaming publishers on board, all major media holding companies, several independent agencies and 75+ advertisers. The company says hundreds of campaigns have transacted on VideoAmp currency and it is on track to deliver billions of advertising spend in currency-guaranteed campaigns for the 2023/2024 broadcast year. Recent funding is intended to accelerate growth, expand adoption of its advanced currency and further establish VideoAmp’s category leadership. VideoAmp is headquartered in Los Angeles and New York. VideoAmp is a software and data company providing cross-platform media measurement and optimization tools that unify audiences across traditional TV, streaming video and digital platforms. Its platform leverages large-scale impression-level data and advanced data science to create a privacy-safe, unified source of truth that connects ad exposures to advertiser sales and enables cross-platform deduplicated audience views. The company reports an exponential revenue CAGR of over 100% for the last five years and positions its platform as a media currency for advertisers, agencies and media sellers. VideoAmp plans to use new capital to accelerate rollout and adoption of its platform and to scale enterprise sales, engineering, data science and client success teams. Recent milestones include currency pilots with six major advertising holding companies, a partnership with ViacomCBS to use VideoAmp as an alternative currency for TV guarantees, and official Facebook Multi-Touch Attribution Measurement Partner status. Headquartered in Los Angeles, VideoAmp is targeting a legacy $120B U.S. advertising market it says has been slow to evolve. VideoAmp provides a unified, privacy-first platform for planning, measurement, optimization and currency solutions across linear TV, streaming and digital media. Its proprietary dataset commingles ACR and set-top-box data across 28M households and integrates with multiple digital sources using privacy-safe clean-room methodologies. The platform delivers impression-level measurement, deduplicated views of advertising performance, and tools to power an alternative media currency. VideoAmp has experienced over 700% growth in the last five years and was on track to approximately double year-over-year growth in 2021. The company has been hiring senior executives (including former Trade Desk CFO Paul Ross) and plans to expand sales, client success and engineering teams. Strategic partnerships cited include OpenAP, Omnicom Media Group, NBCUniversal and dentsu. VideoAmp, based in Los Angeles, provides a software platform that enables marketers and media owners to measure how linear TV, OTT and digital video ads perform against in‑market sales prospects. The platform recommends optimizations and automates their execution to help maximize return on marketing investment. Led by Co‑Founder & CEO Ross McCray, the company serves more than 50 Fortune 500 brands as well as global holding companies, media agencies and media owners including GroupM, Essence, Tyson Foods, A+E Networks, AMC Networks and Tubi. VideoAmp raised a growth round to support scaling efforts and plans to use the funds to expand its enterprise sales by growing customer success and data science teams. The financing is intended to support increased demand from marketers, agencies and media owners. VideoAmp provides an integrated TV operating system that enables advertisers to plan, buy and measure campaigns reaching linear TV, VOD, OTT and digital audiences. Its software and data solution includes a linear suite that allows use of digital data for planning and allocation of upfront TV commitments within existing workflows. The company has structured over 41 strategic partnerships across measurement, distribution and agency partners, including Mediaocean, comScore, Nielsen, FreeWheel, Publicis Groupe, Omnicom and others. VideoAmp intends to use the new funds to expand its engineering team and to license additional first‑party data sets. The company is based in Santa Monica, CA and is led by Co‑Founder & CEO Ross McCray. After this round VideoAmp has raised $36.6M to date.

Led · Seed · Feb 2015

Iotera develops the IOTA GPS pet tracking system, a small, long battery‑life real‑time GPS device that uses a crowd‑sourced wireless network. The network provides tracking coverage across much of the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York City and other large metropolitan areas. While useful for bikes, cars and children, the product is primarily marketed as a pet tracker. Led by CEO Ben Wild, the company is taking pre-orders for the Iota GPS tracker and targeted delivery in the summer of 2015 following a successful July 2014 Kickstarter campaign that generated more than $280k in pre-orders. Iotera closed a $1M financing round to expand delivery of its IOTA pet tracking system. Investors in the round included ZenShin Capital Partners, Crunchfund, Startup Capital Ventures, String Ventures, EarlyMarket and Rubicon Venture Capital.

Participated · Seed · Apr 2013

Strikingly’s core product is a website builder optimized for quick, polished mobile-responsive sites and an editor that the company says can launch a site in about 10 minutes. The company has added a mobile website editor and a reseller program that lets partners buy sites in bulk and manage clients via a dashboard; the reseller program has users in 70 countries. Strikingly doubled its team over the past year from 150 to 300 employees. The company has an office in Shanghai and has become a leading website-building SaaS solution in China through partnerships with Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud and ZBJ. Management plans to continue growing the reseller program in Asia, add more features to help resellers with customer acquisition, and expand in China beyond core website building into enterprise service marketplaces. Strikingly offers a mobile-responsive website-building platform and a standalone mobile app that lets users create, manage and publish sites using only smartphones. The product emphasizes starting with a single landing page and expanding functionality with e-commerce tools, blogs, mobile apps and other features for growing businesses. It targets entrepreneurs, freelancers, design agencies and power users, and has launched a reseller program to reach agencies. The company reports users in about 200 countries, a 90% retention rate, and says 96% of surveyed users would recommend the platform. Strikingly became profitable in its second month after launch (initially "ramen profitability") and grew organically for five years before this round. The team has doubled headcount to 150, with many new hires in product development, and plans to invest in user acquisition and new features to expand in emerging markets. Strikingly, based in San Francisco, provides a platform that allows users to create web and mobile sites that are search engine optimized and connectable to social media. Its platform includes page analytics and a contact form/email collector to connect with users directly. The solution has been used by customers such as Majestic Media and Kip Solutions. The company was founded by David Chen. Strikingly raised seed funding and intends to use the capital to hire new people. No revenue or user metrics were disclosed in the article.