Cross-screen startup VideoAmp said Thursday it has raised a $21.4 million Series B growth round led by Mediaocean, with support from existing investors, including the German broadcast giant RTL Group.
Mediaocean CEO Bill Wise will join VideoAmp’s board of directors.
VideoAmp has raised $36.6 million in total and will use the growth financing to hire more data scientists, ramp up its product and marketing teams and expand internationally.
Mediaocean, which partnered with VideoAmp in May, hopes its strategic investment in the company will boost its innovation as TV planning becomes increasingly automated.
“Mediaocean built this mega-platform and workflow to connect TV buyers and sellers at the transactional level, but we’re bringing new engineering insights and data capabilities as the upfront and scatter market become more audience-based and cross-screen,” said Jay Prasad, chief strategy officer for VideoAmp. “Our engineers are working together closely to unlock a ton of new value.”
VideoAmp’s solutions complement Mediaocean’s objective, which is to streamline and connect different parts of the TV supply chain.
The startup’s applications include a yield management tool for linear TV sellers, a dynamic allocation tool leveraging its Mediaocean integration and a cross-screen DSP for automated guaranteed and OTT inventory.
VideoAmp works with both the buy side and sell side.
It hopes to help the sell side package its inventory more holistically, and to toggle between monetizing upfront, scatter and addressable, audience-based inventory to increase efficiencies.
“We’re creating a platform that shows [sellers] how their data is indexing across last year’s upfront, how it looks forecasting to this year’s upfronts and how do they get the most efficient scale,” Prasad said.
For buyers, it’s adding more functionality to its cross-screen DSP to support programmatic, reserved and/or automated guarantees.
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But one barrier to cross-screen TV buying is that agencies, advertisers and programmers aren’t always aligned in their planning processes.
“Agencies negotiate for scale, the sellers know how many different advertisers want certain things so they can increase price, but the way both sides have made their living will clearly have to go out the window to be able to transact on cross-screen audiences,” Prasad said. “When the buy side wants to plan, the sell side needs to package and both sides need to work together.”
