Smaato gets US$25 million in Series E funds

Smaato, a global mobile real-time bidding (RTB) ad exchange (SMX) and supply side platform (SSP), has received US$25 million in Series E funding. Singapore Press Holdings Ltd (SPH), participated in the round along with Aeris CAPITAL, EDBI and other existing shareholders. Smaato will use the new funds to fuel growth, operations and development of its platform, which is focused on self-serve automation.

Smaato owns and operates Smaato’s Publisher platform (SPP). Smaato’s last funding period was in 2011, when it had 11,686 publishers. It now hosts 78,000 publishers who are able to monetise their inventory across 270+ ad networks and demand side platforms. SMX serves 90 billion+ ad impressions per month to over 450 million unique visitors in the US, EMEA and APAC regions.

“Approximately 65% of our publishers want to monetise mobile apps and the rest are mobile web sites,” said Ragnar Kruse, CEO and Co-founder of Smaato. “With roughly 466% year-to-year growth in programmatic in-app advertising spend, mobile app developers want to have full control of their inventory and data in a self-serve model. As such, we will use this new funding to build out our next-generation SPP platform that will allow for these controls and automation of monetisation on scale across more than 270+ demand sources.”

The new funds from the investors come at a time when there is large demand from global brands for access to regional publisher inventory through programmatic (RTB), which involves online or mobile advertising inventory being bought and sold based on pre-defined rules through instantaneous auctions. This aligns with Smaato’s plan of launching private exchanges controlled by top publishers in APAC looking for automated methods to run premium advertising campaigns.

Smaato currently has 117 employees and is rapidly growing, with 20 open jobs in its offices in San Francisco, New York, Hamburg, Singapore and Jakarta.