French supply-side platform Adyoulike has acquired Paris-based video ad platform Pulpix, the companies said Thursday. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Pulpix had raised only about $1 million in funding since it was founded four years ago.
Pulpix’s co-founder and CEO, Sabry Otmani, and the entire Pulpix team will join Adyoulike. Otmani will move into a video product director role and help spearhead new product development and go-to-market strategy around video.
The acquisition should help Pulpix expand its presence in the US and across Europe and APAC.
After acquiring UK-based native ad network ContentAmp in 2014, Adyoulike CEO Julien Verdier relocated to New York in 2016 to help boost the company’s North American expansion strategy by courting agencies, demand-side platforms and big publishers.
Since then, Adyoulike has doubled down in the US, growing its sales team to about 12 people in New York. It has grown to about 100 employees in total since it was founded in 2011.
Pulpix, which creates video personalization technology for publishers, is filling an important gap in Adyoulike’s stack by bringing more differentiated video supply.
Pulpix works with more than 50 publishers, including French daily L’Équipe, Prisma, Bonnier and RTL Group, to boost their native video ad experiences.
It offers AI-driven video recommendations and interactive overlays, giving users a way to pull up related article content or to share a video to social within the video player itself. Adyoulike, which specialized in native display, wanted to improve its video offering.
“We brought the monetization part, but we were really looking for a good video product,” Verdier said. “We wanted to bridge the gap between native display and native video, and bring to the US market a unique experience for the user, the publisher and the brands and agencies.”
On the flip side, Adyoulike fills an important hole for Pulpix: securing video demand.
Adyoulike already has relationships with most major agency trading desks, as well as big DSPs like The Trade Desk, Google’s DoubleClick Bid Manager, AppNexus and TubeMogul (Adobe).
“Adyoulike will give us more liquidity in our business,” Otmani added. “We were selling our software to major companies, but not bringing the demand on top of it. Now, we will have a full-stack business model for any publisher who wants to grow their video business and monetization.”
Verdier expects formats like mobile and video to account for 50% of Adyoulike’s gross revenues in the near term, thanks to its merger with Pulpix.
“We now have a video product,” he said. “Publishers are looking for more native video, and rather than relying on Facebook to build that business for them, they’re looking to build their own brand and audience on their properties.”
