Big Happy, an adtech company that helps large brands create interactive mobile ads, said Tuesday it had raised $2.5 million in Series A funding, investment it plans to use to grow its team and expand into new advertiser categories such as automotive.
Founded in New York in 2019, Big Happy operates what it calls a creative advertising management platform that can help advertisers quickly spin up mobile ad campaigns and run them across a network of more than 1,000 publishers.
Its mobile studio makes use of 3D computer graphics, augmented reality, and other tech to create eye-catching ad units that stand out from traditional static display ads. The Pillsbury Dough Boy can run across the bottom of the phone screen, for example, or a user could click on a Royal Caribbean ad to open a 360-degree virtual tour of a cruise ship. These types of campaigns typically take only a few days to build, Big Happy says.
Big Happy CEO Jonathan Frohlinger said the company differs from others in the space because it’s built its own tech in-house. That includes compression technology to ensure the animated and 3D ads don’t slow down a publisher’s website or app.
The company says it is profitable and grew revenue by 110% over the last year.
In the summer of 2022, Big Happy raised around $500,000 through a convertible note, led by Infolinks, an ad platform that helps publishers monetize their content with a variety of ad formats and contextual audience targeting.
Infolinks is now taking a 10% stake in Big Happy, which values the mobile ad firm at $25 million. It’s the first investment of this kind for Infolinks, which was founded in 2007 and sold to the video media agency Thrive Plus in 2018.
The supply side of the advertising market is “not well suited for rich media implementations or trying to do creative things — it tries to be this generic, templatized, homogenous thing,” said Infolinks CEO Bob Regular. “Jonathan and Big Happy are trying to do the opposite of that and innovate in an incredibly vanilla environment.”
Big Happy now wants to expand its current team of 50 to around 65 by the end of the year, hiring staffers in areas such as engineering, product, and sales.
Check out the investor pitch deck Big Happy used to raise its $2.5 million Series A round.
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