Vibe, an adtech platform that helps small to medium-sized businesses advertise on streaming TV, said Thursday it had raised a $22.5 million Series A funding round, fresh funds it plans to invest in growing its team and improving the platform’s measurement capabilities.
Founded in France in 2021, Vibe offers a self-service ad platform that aims to make it super-easy for smaller companies to get their ads next to premium TV content. Buyers upload their video ad, select the app, channel, or sports league they want to advertise on, and the audience they want to reach. The platform then uses automation to adapt the campaign for the best results.
Vibe’s cofounders Franck Tetzlaff and Arthur Querou previously founded the adtech startup KMTX, which specialized in using AI models and semantic targeting to improve the performance of ads. Vibe was carved out from KMTX, which sold to fellow adtech firm Seedtag in 2022 for an undisclosed sum.
At the time of its launch, streaming and connected-TV was booming. “We said, OK, let’s just build the Google Ads of TV,” Querou told Business Insider. Vibe has already grown from no revenue at launch in September to 2022 to “eight figures” by 2023, which Querou said helped it attract interest from both investors and major publishers.
Querou said Vibe’s biggest near-term priority is to reach $100 million of annual ad spending passing through its platform, which it expects to get to in around 12 to 18 months.
Vibe intends to grow its team from 36 currently to around 110 staffers, which will include hiring in areas like sales and machine learning. It’s also planning to further develop the platform’s measurement capabilities and build free-to-use tools for publishers and broadcasters to improve the demand for their ads.
The fundraising process took just four weeks between starting the roadshow and getting the term sheet signed, Querou said.
Raffi Kamber, general partner of Singular, which led the round, said the venture capital firm was attracted to Vibe because it had already had a long relationship with its “high-caliber” founders and that it’s providing a solution for a tricky area of adtech.
“The ad platform for SMBs on broadcasting and streaming TV is difficult to cover because it requires a lot of manpower to be able to address all these SMBs,” Kamber said. “No one has been able to fully automate that and these guys have cracked it.”
Check out a redacted version of the pitch deck that helped Vibe nab $22.5 million in Series A funding from Singular, Elaia Partners, Sequoia’s Scout fund, Motier, and other individual investors.
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