LucidMedia announced today that it has raised $4.5 million in new funds led by MMV Financial (MMV). Read the release.
Ajay Sravanapudi, CEO at LucidMedia, discussed the new funding and the company’s plans.
AdExchanger.com: Please discuss your new round of funding and why you chose MMV.
AS: We had many options available to us in this round but MMV was the ideal funding partner at this stage in our execution plan and capitalization strategy. MMV is truly dedicated to providing timely and effective growth capital to emerging technology companies like LucidMedia. They are focused on the North American market and the amount of capital they typically provide ranges from $1.5M to $10.0M which was also a perfect fit for us.
Where do you see the $4.5 million going? Any critical needs such as “feet on the street”?
We are applying the proceeds from this funding round to expand on our recently launched self-service platform that gives agencies and advertisers more control and enables them to more efficiently manage their display advertising campaigns. The funds are being used to bring additional capabilities to market and to do so sooner so we can better capture the escalating DSP opportunity. And since we own the full technology stack in our demand-side platform, with the additional funds we are launching new capabilities not as disparate products but as unified new features within our platform. It allows us to be more nimble and responsive to our advertiser’s requirements.
Are there too many demand-side platforms today and how will LucidMedia differentiate?
There are not really all that many demand-side platforms out there. Much of the static in the DSP space today is centered around attracting attention in the venture capital circles. But when it comes to getting in front of an advertiser and demonstrating real capabilities in a real product that you can actually use to deliver value and efficiency, the number of DSPs can be counted on one hand (minus a few fingers). There are too many companies calling themselves a demand-side platform though. We have run hundreds of successful campaigns for the majority of Fortune 500 companies out there over the last 18 months that we have been operating as a DSP. In that time we have proven that several capabilities are unique to what LucidMedia offers. This includes our proprietary contextual and audience targeting, ability to police a true universal frequency cap (UFC), and real-time assessment (RTA) across all sources. In addition, our DSP provides dynamic inventory allocation across RTB sources and even premium buys, true preemptive brand safety, and campaign optimization at the page-level. We also offer custom integrations with all 3rd party data providers, real-time bid (RTB) inventory availability insights by channel, and a server-side cookie store for proprietary audience targeting.
By John Ebbert
