Kevel has new funding and a shopping list.
On Wednesday, the retail media infrastructure company announced a $52 million Series D. Kevel plans to use some of that money to fund potential acquisitions, CEO and Founder James Avery told AdExchanger.
“There are a lot of retail media players out there, and a lot of people are selling to the same customers,” Avery said. “Consolidation is going to happen.”
The raise, which brings Kevel’s total funding to just over $100 million, includes strategic investments from Fulcrum Equity Partners, Dunnhumby Ventures LLC, Iberis Capital and additional growth capital from ORIX USA.
According to Avery, Kevel is “pretty close to profitable” and expects to get there by the end of the year.
Avery was more coy, however, about sharing whose tires Kevel might be kicking, although he did say it would make sense to look at vendors in “adjacent” areas, the sort of tech providers that retailers use alongside Kevel.
Not that he’s rushing. It might be worth waiting until there are better deals to be had.
“Some prices are really good, and some prices are still pretty high,” Avery said. “The price really just depends on if a company has ‘AI’ in its name and whether it has an AI story to tell.”
Trust is earned
The AI story that Kevel tells about itself centers on “transparent AI decisioning,” which Avery likens to “a form of forensic science.”
What, for example, were all the ads in an auction? What influenced the bid prices? Why was a decision made? And if the results aren’t good, what can be done to fix them?
Retailers want that level of detail, Avery said.
“It’s not enough to say, ‘Trust us, this is doing the best it can for you,” he said. “We can go back and do diagnostics.”
Providing transparency can also be better for performance, Avery argued.
“A model that explains itself is more effective than a black box because retailers can see what’s driving the results and adjust them,” he said. “You can understand how to make tweaks.”
The fight against fragmentation
But transparency only goes so far when every retailer’s network works differently – and no brand wants to have to log into and learn how to use umpteen different systems.
“We joke that we’re going to help launch 1,000 walled gardens,” Avery said, “but then the brands are, like, ‘No, please don’t, actually!’”
To help address the fragmentation problem, Kevel is working with Tesco’s retail media arm, Dunnhumby, on the Dunnhumby Network Alliance, an aggregator that lets brands reach shoppers at Tesco, John Lewis and Kingfisher, which owns multiple home improvement and garden center retailers, all in one buy.
Beyond aggregation, another fix is to let brands buy through the tools they already use.
For example, Kevel has worked with Pacvue and Skai, two platforms advertisers use to manage campaigns across retailers, on API-based buying, so brands can plug into multiple networks without logging into each one. And for its client Dollar General, Kevel built an integration with The Trade Desk, so brands that already buy the retailer’s off-site ads through the DSP can also buy Dollar General’s on-site ads the same way.
“We just want to make it easier for brands to buy,” Avery said.
AdX-cited
Meanwhile, in another corner of the open web, Google is facing court-ordered changes to how its ad tech works – and Avery, who was a witness in the DOJ’s ad tech antitrust trial against Google in 2024, is here for it.
When Avery was on the stand, he talked about how Kevel, which was then called Adzerk, tried and failed to compete with Google’s ad server, DFP, because of the tie between it and AdX. Kevel was eventually forced to pivot away from the open web to retail media to escape Google’s dominance.
Once finalized, the remedies will likely require Google to share bid data with publishers and plug AdX and its ad server into Prebid. Avery says to sign him right up.
Despite its main focus on retail and commerce, Kevel still runs a traditional ad server, and Avery said he’s looking forward to being able to tell his publisher clients, “Hey, guys. You can finally get off GAM!”
“And I’m really excited to integrate with AdX,” Avery said. “I’ve only been trying to do it for 16 years.”
