Intelligence company, AdNear has announced it has raised US$19 million from Telstra Ventures and Global Brain as part of its strategic plan to expand into multiple new markets.
Both its existing investors, Sequoia Capital and Canaan Partners, also participated in the capital raising round.
AdNear has developed insights from anonymous device users across Asia Pacific using their historical location footprint and real-world offline data. Leveraging these insights, the company is able to programmatically send relevant ads to mobile audiences on behalf of advertisers using its proprietary real-time bidding platform. It has rapidly grown its client base to include hundreds of marquee brands such as P&G, Woolworths, Audi, Unilever, BMW, Ford, Samsung, IKEA, and Adidas.
Mark Sherman, managing director at Telstra Ventures said: “Mobile advertising continues to grow rapidly across Asia Pacific. Telstra Ventures recognizes the value that AdNear’s probabilistic, data-driven approach brings to advertisers and we’re excited to be able to provide capital to accelerate the expansion of AdNear’s operations.” Mark Sherman will now join the AdNear Board of Directors.
Anil Mathews, CEO at AdNear said: “We’re thrilled to be joined by investors such as Telstra Ventures and Global Brain in this journey. Our proprietary technology enables us to help major brands across Asia Pacific fine-tune their consumer targeting by having access to real-time location intelligence. Location data-driven insights are extremely powerful and marketers can use these data points to understand consumer behaviour and also build customized campaigns as per their target audience.” Mathews also added: “We are constantly experimenting with location datasets for various use-cases and will be productizing some of these in the coming months.”
Yasuhiko Yurimoto, president and CEO, Global Brain Corp said: “We appreciated AdNear’s superior technologies and highly experienced team, and firmly believe that AdNear will become a leading player in the global adtech market in the near future.”
Mohit Bhatnagar, managing director, Sequoia Capital said: “AdNear has been focused on analyzing location data at scale to understand user behaviour, and the response from clients across markets has been phenomenal. We believe that markets such as Japan present significant opportunities for AdNear’s technology and we look forward to leveraging our expertise and network to help the company succeed in these markets.”
Commenting on the investment, Rahul Khanna, managing director of Canaan India, said: “Over the last year, AdNear has seen a 12x growth in its device user base and we are very excited about AdNear taking its offerings to new markets. With data-driven marketing opportunities increasing by the day, AdNear’s data insights become very valuable”
In 2012 AdNear closed its Series A round of funding of US$6.3 million from Sequoia Capital and Canaan Partners to support its expansion in the Asia Pacific region and grow the team. It has since been adding approximately 1.2 million anonymous device users daily to its probabilistic profiles database.
