Round Led by Mithera Capital with TransUnion, Connecticut Innovations, Arab Angel Fund and Progress Ventures to Enable Global Expansion for Leading OTT Audience Intelligence and Data Management Solution
Tru Optik, the leader in over-the-top (OTT) targeting, measurement, and privacy management, announced the close of a $10 million venture round led by Mithera Capital. Additional investors in the round include TransUnion, Connecticut Innovations, Arab Angel Fund, and Progress Ventures.
Coming from almost 11x year-over-year growth in its SaaS/DaaS business, the funds will allow Tru Optik to increase its sales and marketing activity, accelerate international growth, expand its proprietary OTT Household Graph, which today comprises of more than 80MM households, and extend its capabilities across other forms of addressable advertising such as streaming audio.
“Tru Optik’s technology anonymously maps every OTT screen across 80MM US homes, enabling advertisers to reach more than 90 percent of ad-supported OTT viewers. The audience reach and targeting precision we offer is unmatched in the OTT ad ecosystem, which is why more than 10,000 brands and advertisers rely on Tru Optik to drive their audience-based capabilities to build their ad-supported CTV offerings,” said Andre Swanston, CEO of Tru Optik.
Swanston continued, “This investment will allow us to better capitalize on our lead in this space and pull further ahead as we bring our suite of services to a global customer base.”
OTT ad revenues are expected to exceed $20 billion in the US alone by 2020.
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“Tru Optik is the engine that drives advanced audience targeting and granular/actionable measurement for OTT advertising,” said Mark Feldman, COO and Managing Director at Mithera Capital. “Massive growth of OTT advertising is inevitable, and we are especially excited to get behind Tru Optik because they occupy a unique position in the future of television.”
Tru Optik empowers agencies, direct advertisers, publishers, and ad tech platforms to execute precision-targeted OTT campaigns at scale by activating any of thousands of third-party audience segments or first-party data against Tru Optik’s privacy-compliant household graph of 80 million households. In addition, Tru Optik’s recent partnership with Oracle makes Oracle Data Cloud segments available for targeting across OTT/CTV for the first time. Tru Optik also provides unique census-level cross-device measurement and audience validation solutions for OTT ad campaigns.
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“OTT is already a mainstream viewing option, globally. However, brands and media companies need the advanced one-to-one targeting capabilities and census-level measurement that Tru Optik provides to realize OTT’s advertising potential,” said Matt Spiegel, Executive Vice President, Digital Marketing Solutions and Head of Media Vertical at TransUnion. “We’re also thinking about ways Tru Optik and TransUnion might break new ground in areas like identity management, privacy protection, and attribution. Both companies are leaders in their respective industries on these fronts, so it will be exciting to put our heads together and see if we can advance the state of the art.”
“Our partnership with Tru Optik has enabled XUMO to provide more value to advertisers to reach thousands of different consumer segments, as well as measure and validate audiences accurately in real time. As the destination for free live and on-demand streaming entertainment, it only makes sense that we would leverage a DMP built specifically for OTT and Connected TV,” said Colin Petrie-Norris, CEO at XUMO.
“We’re proud to say that Videology, now a part of Amobee, was the first video ad technology to integrate with Tru Optik over two years ago. We continue to advance our converged video solutions so brands can more accurately reach their desired audiences across TV & Connected TV more holistically. Tru Optik is an important partner in our ability to work with first and third-party data for targeting across Connected TV supply, which is today’s fastest growing channel in the video eco-system,” said Aleck Schleider, Senior Vice President, Client and Data Strategy at Amobee.
