SEATTLE, June 10, 2014 (ADOTAS) – Placed, the leader in location insights and mobile ad intelligence, today announced a $10 million Series B funding led by Two Sigma Ventures, the venture capital division of Two Sigma Investments. David Joerg, Managing Director at Two Sigma, will join the Placed Board of Directors. Existing investor Madrona Venture Group also participated in the round.
Placed will use the funds to expand its suite of location insights and mobile ad intelligence products for a growing list of customers and partners, including over half of the top 25 mobile ad networks and publishers in the US, and a significant portion of the Advertising Age 100.
On a daily basis Placed directly measures 175 million consumer locations, providing the clearest integrated view of digital behavior, physical location, and the impact of media. The underlying models source data on an opt-in basis to ensure consumer privacy, and have been validated by consumers over 14 million times.
“Placed runs the largest opt-in mobile location panel in the world,” said Joerg. “Measuring the location of over 175,000 people, in high-fidelity and with consent, yields a depth of insight nobody else can offer. Placed exemplifies the kind of company Two Sigma Ventures looks to invest in – a business using data and technology to solve real problems in new ways. We believe that David Shim and Placed’s team are building what will become the standard for location intelligence.”
“Two Sigma’s data-intensive approach to investment management mirrors Placed’s approach to providing multiple layers of value from location intelligence, making this an ideal partnership,” said David Shim (pictured), Founder and CEO of Placed. “We’re excited to have Two Sigma, a successful technology driven investment management firm, join us as one of our lead investor partners.”
Placed Attribution, the independent and unbiased solution to connect mobile advertising to real world store visits, added ten significant new partners in the past quarter made up some of the largest mobile publishers and ad networks in the US including Pandora, The Weather Channel, Rocket Fuel, InMobi, Undertone, and AdTheorent. These partners join other industry leaders including Millennial Media, PayPal, Thinknear, Verve, and xAd. (For a complete list of partners, click here.)
“Attribution is the key to increasing investment in mobile advertising and in 2014, with these new partners, Placed Attribution is the clear leader in terms of market share, and is the recognized standard currency across advertisers, agencies, publishers, and networks,” said Shim. “Optimizing by click-through rates (CTR) is no longer an option, when in-store visitation is readily available.”
“We, at Pandora, envision this being the year of mobile ROI for marketers and Placed is helping that vision become a reality,” said Heidi Browning, SVP, Strategic Solutions at Pandora. “Their independent, best in class solution showcases the value of mobile advertising and helps us deliver to advertisers the metrics they want and the insights that will drive their businesses.”
About Placed
Placed (www.placed.com) is the leader in location-driven insights and mobile ad intelligence. Measuring billions of locations across the world’s largest opt-in mobile location panel, Placed provides the most complete understanding of consumers’ offline behaviors.
Connecting the physical and digital worlds, Placed gives brands, agencies, publishers and ad networks the ability to target location at scale, measure the offline impact of mobile ads, and deliver actionable insights into consumer behavior. Founded in January 2011, Placed is headquartered in Seattle and is backed by Madrona Venture Group and Two Sigma Ventures.
About Two Sigma Ventures
Two Sigma Ventures (www.twosigmaventures.com) is a division of Two Sigma Investments, a leading technology company that applies a rigorous, scientific method-based approach to investment management. Since its founding in 2001, Two Sigma Investments’ vision has been to develop technological innovations that intelligently analyze the world’s data to consistently deliver value for our clients. Two Sigma Ventures draws on Two Sigma’s expertise in modeling, engineering and private investing to invest proprietary capital in innovative companies that are at various stages of growth and across a number of industries and that harness technology, science, mathematics, or data to tackle problems in a new way.
About Madrona Venture Group
Madrona (www.madrona.com) has been investing in early-stage technology companies in the Pacific Northwest since 1995 and has been privileged to play a role in some of the region’s most successful technology ventures. The firm invests predominately in seed and Series A rounds across the information technology spectrum, including consumer Internet, commercial software and services, digital media and advertising, networking and cloud computing, and mobile. Madrona manages approximately $1 billion and was an early investor in companies such as Amazon.com, Apptio, Isilon Systems, and Redfin.
