Social Native received extensive interest from investors in the wake of the company's early success creating content for brands like Polaroid, Walgreens and General Motors. In an oversubscribed round, Social Native attracted funds from a number of leading venture capital firms including SoftBank Capital.

The funding will enable Social Native to double down on their investment into the Content Optimization Engine and further the company's mission of using technology to reimagine the creative industry while investing in sales and marketing to continue claiming market share.

"We're pleased to see continued and growing interest in our technology across the globe," says Social Native CEO David Shadpour. "Brands are faced with the challenge of creating high volumes of personalized content to deliver relevant customer experiences, and prior to Social Native, this was a seemingly impossible task. It's exciting to see the impact Social Native is having on the digital marketing landscape and the interest not just from brands, but also the investor community."

"Brands are trying to keep up with the demand to create relevant customer experiences for all marketing channels," said Jordan Levy, General Partner at SoftBank Capital NY. "This demand for personalized content has created a huge market opportunity for Social Native. They have the team, technology and vision needed to transform the industry. And now, the results. The company is producing astounding metrics for brands by automating the traditionally manual process of content creation."

Shadpour added, "Artificial intelligence and machine learning technology has become core to Social Native's ability to predict which creators and content will reap the highest performance for each unique branded content initiative. We're able to improve and optimize content being created on our platform in real-time based on historic performance, while ensuring that only the most relevant and highest caliber of creators are invited to participate in our campaigns."

Two industry veterans invested in Social Native and later joined the executive team full time; Jeff Ragovin, Chief Growth Officer at Social Native, who co-founded Buddy Media, which sold for $745 million to Salesforce, and Eytan Elbaz, Chief Strategy Officer at Social Native, famed for co-creating AdSense that was bought by Google for $102 million.

"Social Native's technology is unparalleled in content marketing," concluded Jeff Ragovin. "Not only have we completely automated the creative development process, but we're building technology that will create a fundamental shift in how brands think about content creation."

ABOUT SOCIAL NATIVE
Social Native is the technology platform for creating high performing branded content. Social Native connects brands with a diverse network of content creators, globally, to create custom content on demand. Headquartered in Los Angeles, California, Social Native is backed by veterans of Google, Salesforce, Scopely, Applied Semantics, & Buddy Media, whose past startups have created over $6B in equity value. Visit socialnative.com to learn more.


ABOUT SOFTBANK
The SoftBank Group is a global technology player that aspires to drive the Information Revolution. The SoftBank Group is comprised of the holding company SoftBank Group Corp. (TOKYO: 9984) and its global portfolio of companies, which includes advanced telecommunications, internet services, AI, smart robotics, IoT and clean energy technology providers. In September 2016, ARM Holdings plc, the world's leading semiconductor IP company, joined the SoftBank Group. To learn more, please visit www.softbank.com.