Adelphic Mobile is one of a handful of companies trying to address the problem of poor audience segmentation in mobile. It hopes to get there faster with the help of a $10 million investment led by Google Ventures.
The money is earmarked largely for marketing and other go-to-market spending. “We’ve been pretty heads down, working with our partners,” says President Jennifer Lum, who hails along with her cofounder Changfeng Weng from Quattro Wireless (later Apple iAd). “We haven’t really done any marketing at all.”
The Adelphic platform serves both buy and sell-side customers (AdExchanger Q&A). On the publisher side it helps partners create segments so their own sales teams can better sell the media, using around 30 device signals to infer a person’s age, gender, and location among other attributes.
“As calls come in from our various partners, we’re determining properties of the user, what the value is of this opportunity and if we think there are any potential matches we can make in our system to generate high user engagement and high ROI,” says cofounder Jennifer Lum.
Adelphic supports nearly 20 billion inventory transactions per month as of November, indicating some large and important inventory publishers, but the company has not yet identified them.
On the advertiser side, Adelphic says it aggregates mobile inventory and adds reach while focusing on audience segments that are relevant to brand marketers. “Coke isn’t thinking about user segments of iPhone 5 or AT&T,” she said.
Rich Miner of Google Ventures, who is a cofounder of Android, joins Adelphic’s board. The investment also had participation from previous investor Matrix Partners, which led a $2 million round in May 2011.
In addition to go-to-market, Adelphic will spend some of the $10 million on product development and building out its staff, which now numbers 22 plus a small offshore team.
“It’s really about putting our products in the hands of many customers,” Lum said of the round.
