Following Wix’s $40 million announcement yesterday – growth capital seems to be the name of the game in Israel this week. Adap.tv, the video advertising company started by Shopping.com’s founder and former CTO Amir Ashkenazi, has announced a $20 million series C, led by Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP) and joined by previous investors Gemini Israel Funds, Redpoint Ventures and Spark Capital. To date, Adap.tv has raised $43 million including this round.
Adap.tv developed a marketplace for video publishers and advertisers. Their platform, enables publishers to sell ad space on their video content, across all ad networks from a single place. For advertisers, Adap.tv offers access to over 60 million viewers, across 4,000 sites, which generate 1.8 billion video ad impressions monthly.
Take a small cut of every transaction (as marketplaces do) and you get nice growing cash flow. So why do they need the money? Adap.tv says it will use the new funding to support international growth, expand product development, and strengthen the company’s footprint in the U.S, according to this post on TechCrunch. In our view, it’s a combination of giving the entrepreneurs some liquidity (likely) and perhaps having a bit of cash for a small acquisition.
The video advertising space is a crowded one, but Adap.tv seems to have found its place amongst the top 10 video ad networks, facing competition from players like Hulu, VideoEgg, Brightroll, Brightcove and Google (I’m a Google Employee – see disclaimer). Their strength, it seems, is in their ability to form partnerships with leading platforms across data providers, Analytics services and ad verification systems. Just take a look at their partners page, and you’ll see what I mean.
I'm a former general partner at google ventures, head of Google for Entrepreneurs in Europe and founding head of Campus London, Google's first physical hub for startups.
I'm also the founder of Techbikers, a non-profit bringing together the startup ecosystem on cycling challenges in support of Room to Read. Since inception in 2012 we've built 11 schools and 50 libraries in the developing world.
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